The Laurentis Countdown
by Tristan Palmgren
Summary: An old nightmare from Bunnie's past threatens to destroy everything her friends have struggled to build. Finally complete.
1. Resurgence

All Sonic the Hedgehog characters are copyright the Sega Corporation, Archie Publications, and DiC Productions. This story is copyright Tristan Palmgren, but distribution is rabidly encouraged. Rated PG for language and violence. References are made to characters from Dan Drazen's "Runaway" fanfic. They are, of course, his property.  
  
Questions, comments, compliments, and flames are all more than welcome. Send them to charpalm@mediaone.net  
  
Author's note: The descriptions of Bunnie's biomechanical limbs are based on her appearance in the satAM series, and not on her (too variable) looks in Archie. The romance angle is also taken from satAM, not Archie. In fact, all continuity data from Archie has been ignored. So I'm a purist, so what?  
  
This is a rough draft; more polished versions will appear sometime in the future.  
  
THE LAURENTIS COUNTDOWN  
  
A Sonic the Hedgehog story by Tristan Palmgren  
  
  
  
Timeline: Spring 3235, the latter half of the SatAM cartoon's second season.  
  
The stranger was going to die, of that everyone was certain. The rudimentary medical facilities of under-equipped Knothole village could, at best, only delay the inevitable. Even in the care of the most advanced, state-of-the-art hospitals the like of which existed only in Robotropolis his fate would have been uncertain.  
  
But here it was sealed.  
  
Even more of a mystery then the stranger himself was the question of why, with the last few ounces of energy left to him, he asked to see Bunnie Rabbot.  
  
Bunnie stood outside, shivering in the chilly autumn wind, asking herself this over and over. Ever since discovering the mortally wounded man amidst the rubble of the city, a morbid atmosphere had settled over the ordinarily serene forest hamlet of Knothole. It was at once infuriating and tormenting to have fought so long and hard to save and rescue this man only to have his life snatched away because of a cruel twist of nature.  
  
Bunnie remembered the nights, just after they had discovered the internal injuries that wracked the stranger's body, when Tails had overheard that their visitor was going to die. The kitsune had been terrified. He protested over and over that he was here, in Knothole, so that Aunt Sally could save his life. The idea that there was nothing any of them could do had simply never occurred to him. He had been raised to believe that there was no such thing as a futile venture. When he finally arrived at the concept, he could do little but break down into tears. It had taken all of Bunnie's willpower to not join him.  
  
She paced listlessly in front of the darkened medical cabin, wishing she weren't alone. It was mid-afternoon, usually the pinnacle of activity in the village, but today there was hardly another person in sight. There were only her own raging thoughts to keep her company. She kept asking herself the same questions, finding no answers, and wishing that she didn't have to do this.  
  
Bunnie was glad, then, when the doors of the cabin slipped open, revealing Sally Acorn. She shut the door gently behind her.  
  
"He's ready to see you now," she said softly, voice dropped to almost a whisper.  
  
"Ah- Ah don't know if Ah want to do this. Ah guess Ah don't have much of a choice, though." Bunnie glanced at the cabin's nearby windows. Curtains had been drawn to bar the sunlight's entrance. "How long does he have?"  
  
"No more than a day, now. Maybe less. The internal bleeding is that bad." Sally's hand landed on her friend's shoulder. Her organic shoulder. The stranger had only been in Knothole for two days, and already it was almost too late. "I know this isn't easy for any of us, but be strong in there. For his sake."  
  
Bunnie's eyes softened. "Ah will, Sally-girl."  
  
Sally took her hand away, gesturing towards the cabin doors. "Good luck." Bunnie nodded in silent affirmation.  
  
She opened the cabin doors, taking a deep breath as light spilled across the darkened interior of the medical ward. Bunnie hesitated on the fringes of the door, steeling herself for the tragedy that lay beyond. She had only seen the stranger, this Drizit, once, and that was before anybody could guess at the severity of his wounds.  
  
They had found him almost by pure chance, crawling through the rubble of one of Robotropolis's junk yards. He said he had been hiding there for years before he was discovered. A SWATbot had shot him twice, once in the arm, and once in the chest. He had barely managed to escape when it happened. Ordinarily a few months' recovery would heal the wounds, but Drizit was old and frail enough as it was, and the laser blasts had pushed his fragile organs to the brink of collapse.  
  
Drizit had been overjoyed when the Freedom Fighters found him. He had thought that he would survive for sure, not knowing that the shock and the injuries already were forcing his leaking heart to slow and shut down. Bunnie hadn't heard much from him after that, but Sally had told them all that he was as much heartbroken now as he was enraptured earlier.  
  
Stepping through the doorway was like plunging into a cauldron of swirling darkness, and inky black so thick as to defy the eye to adjust. Drizit, apparently, liked it this way. Coming in from the daylight, Bunnie was nearly blinded. She could see the outline of a bed at the other end of the room, and the unmoving form of a body beneath the sheets, but not much else. Even that disappeared when the door behind her shut, trapping the rest of the sunlight outside.  
  
Complete silence permeated the air. For a dismal moment, Bunnie thought that Drizit had already passed on.  
  
"I apologize for the darkness," the stranger spoke, a scratching hiss. He was clearly trying for all he was worth to not appear pathetic, and not succeeding. He paused for a moment before speaking again, mustering his feeble health. "Princess Acorn told me that not many of you like it this way."  
  
Bunnie nodded, wondering if he could even see her. "That's true."  
  
"I guess living without the company of light for so long makes one accustomed to its absence." He sighed, almost wistfully. "Regretful, isn't it? Spending the last few years of one's life hiding, like a rat, in Robotropolis's sewers. I never thought I'd die being afraid of the sun."  
  
Bunnie didn't quite know what to say. "Um... y'all wanted to see me?"  
  
"That's right. Why don't you come closer? Just because I'm fond of the dark doesn't mean I can see too well in it."  
  
As Bunnie moved towards the bed, and her eyes adjusted to the room, she could just see the dying starling's face. His expression bespoke of an inner strength the rest of his body didn't have. It struck her that he didn't look half as strong when they first found him; as if he now held a purpose that had escaped him earlier.  
  
"Ah... didn't even know you knew mah name," Bunnie confessed. She still didn't know why Drizit had asked to see her, specifically, and the question keep resurfacing in her mind.  
  
"I've know you all for quite some time now. Didn't the Princess tell you?"  
  
"She hasn't been talking much. neither have the rest of us."  
  
Drizit seemed to consider this for a moment. "Understandable. I realize that having me here isn't exactly. easy on all of you."  
  
Bunnie's next words came to her instinctively. "Now, don't waste your time worryin' about us. Please. We're..." she hesitated, "Well, we're not the one who needs it."  
  
"I'm used to worrying about you. Old habits aren't as fragile as my body, I guess."  
  
"Now, don't you ever give up hope, sugar. There's got to be some way to-"  
  
Drizit interrupted her. "Stop right there. Hope's in short enough supply on this world without wasting it on lost causes like me."  
  
It wasn't often that Bunnie actually had to struggle to come up with reassuring words. They usually came to her naturally. "Ah find that, here, there's always more than enough of it to go around."  
  
"But in this case, I'm not the one who needs the most. Trust me." When she didn't answer, he weakly patted the side of the bed. "Sit down. I have something to tell you, and it isn't going to be easy."  
  
Bunnie compiled, taking a seat at the foot of the bed.  
  
"If the Princess didn't tell you about me, I guess I'm going to have to." He sighed. "I thought telling this story once would be the end of it... it's nothing I'm exactly proud of. A decade ago, during the coup, I managed to survive only by taking flight and running downwards, deep in the sewers underneath Robotropolis itself. I hid there for years, knowing that I had to do something to stop Ivo Robotnik, but never having enough courage to go out. I settled for hacking into the city's security system, watching everything through cameras. That's how I first saw you and the other Freedom Fighters."  
  
Bunnie nodded attentively. Drizit seemed to need prompting, so she said, "Go on."  
  
"Ever since you and your friends were fourteen years old, I've watched you. I never managed to get the courage to go to the surface and help you raid the city, though. The most I could manage was cheering for you from my hiding place. Last week, though, I saw something on the cameras, something that I had to get to the surface and warn you about. I was afraid, but this was so big that fear hardly played a factor in my decision. Something horrendous is going to happen, Bunnie."  
  
"Oh mah stars... you went to the surface and got found out, right? That's when-"  
  
"The SWATbots shot me, and reduced me to this, yes. It wasn't supposed to end like that. God, I wish it hadn't. But that's not important right now. I *need* to tell you this." Drizit's hand reached up, taking Bunnie's flesh-and-blood hand and squeezing it.  
  
Bunnie felt a yawning pit open in her stomach, the magnitude of which she thought could only exist in nightmares. It was as if she knew what he was going to say next. Her blood felt icy cold as it pulsed through her veins.  
  
"On the cameras, I saw it. It's the Laurentis nodule, Bunnie. Robotnik's found a way to activate the Laurentis nodule."  
  
She shot straight up, stumbling backwards and away from the bed. Denial overcame her. This was the stuff of nightmares, of unreality. This couldn't be real. The machine, buried dormant within the electronics and moving parts of her roboticized right leg, couldn't be a threat now. Not after all these years.  
  
Drizit shook his head sadly, as if sensing Bunnie's thoughts. "He's finally cracked the inventor's code. When I left, he was busy transmitting random signals, trying to get a response from the nodule." He paused. "He's trying to find you, Bunnie, and he's going to succeed."  
  
A single word managed to escape her seized-up throat. "How?"  
  
"I'm not quite sure. It took him two years to crack Laurentis's design, figure out a way to remote-activate the transmitter. He's just sending out streams of random digits now, but sooner or later he's going to stumble on the activation code."  
  
Bunnie laid a hand on her neck; the skin underneath the fur was warm and clammy. "This just can't be." Memories flashed through her mind's eye faster than she could follow them. Memories, nightmares, it was too difficult to discern between them.  
  
"When that happens... well, we both know what comes next."  
  
"Ah... Ah won't be able to run anymore."  
  
Drizit nodded. "Neither will your friends, if you're here when the transmitter activates."  
  
The world was spinning, but she had to ask nonetheless. She tried unsuccessfully to blink away a tear. "How long?"  
  
"I don't know. Robotnik was still ticking through random codes when I left, trying each one in turn and waiting for a response. For all we know, he could've already activated it. At most, you only have a few days."  
  
"This can't be happening, can it?" Her friends, her family, all wiped out in an instant, all because she had never told anyone. They would have no warning.  
  
"It is." If anything, Drizit sounded more melancholy about this than he did his own impending death.  
  
"Then mah life... is *over*. Ah have to leave here before it happens. At least then they won't get caught with me."  
  
"If the Freedom Fighters are going to survive, then yes, you have to leave now. But." Drizit hesitated, "Please, Bunnie, never give up the hope. Like you said, there's always more than enough of it to go around."  
  
Bunnie looked at him as if he had just suggested that roboticization wasn't such a bad idea. "Don't you git it?" she cried. "If this is true, there is no hope! No matter how much Ah fight it, Ah'm done for!" She turned towards the door, ready to storm out and run, run as far away as possible.  
  
"Wait!" he called. She stopped at the threshold of the cabin, ready to wrench open the doorknob. "There is hope!"  
  
"No... not here."  
  
"Bunnie, I may have been alone and isolated in hiding for most of the years since the coup, but I still had some contacts. I've had access to information not many, not even Robotnik, could hope to have."  
  
Bunnie stood there listening, unashamed of the tears that rolled down her face. "Like what?"  
  
"Laurentis himself is still alive and well, down in Lower Mobius."  
  
"What? Ya mean-"  
  
"You have to find Laurentis, Bunnie. It's not likely that the nodule can be uninstalled from your system, but if it can, he's the one who'd know how. You *have* to find him."  
  
Bunnie shook her head, getting ready to argue but then thinking better of it. "Ah. suppose you're right. But-"  
  
"No buts. If you're to even have a chance of survive the hunt that's going to come, you have to go see Laurentis as soon as possible."  
  
Bunnie looked down at the floor, feeling horribly guilty despite the personal hell the last few seconds had put her through. This complete stranger had given up his life to save hers, and now the only way she could repay him was by leaving while he was left here to die. She walked back to the bed, and took his hand, squeezing it tightly as if it were the last anchor she had to her home. In a way, it was.  
  
"Ah know this is horrible for both us, but. Ah can't thank you enough for doing what you did, even if it wasn't worth the price you paid." She felt him squeeze back.  
  
"Godspeed, Bunnie."  
  
***  
  
The cargo sled wasn't a very exotic machine, but it was the best the Knothole Freedom Fighters could throw together with their limited resources, and it served its purpose well enough. It was designed to carry supplies and equipment from campsite to campsite, and built from junk scavenged from Robotropolis's numerous scrap piles. There were others just like it parked around Knothole itself, but Bunnie had chosen this one for a reason. It was furthest away the village itself. There was no one around to see her take it, or see her abandon the only friends she had known.  
  
No one around to see her cry.  
  
The passenger compartment was cramped enough normally, but the bulky size of Bunnie's metal limbs made it nearly impossible to fit inside. It was just another reminder of her lost limbs, and the time bomb ticking inside them.  
  
She slipped her hand down past the sled's steering column, and hit the ignition. The electric motor that powered the sled came to life with a reassuring hum. and then sputtered out a moment later.  
  
Bunnie tried the ignition again a moment later. This time, the engine didn't even try to start. The dashboard's lights remained obstinately dead.  
  
Frustrated, she kicked the passenger compartment's door open, and walked to the front of the vehicle. The hood, at least, opened easily, but half of the hastily-assembled gear inside she couldn't make sense of. She didn't see anything immediately out of place, either. Halfheartedly, she fiddled with the things that she did know, and climbed back into the driver's seat. Again, the engine didn't start. With everything that had happened to her already, she didn't need this, too.  
  
She went through the same procedure twice more, each time with the same lack of results. Finally, Bunnie gave up and collapsed on the steering column, shoulders quaking.  
  
"Bunnie?"  
  
Evidently, the hover sled hadn't been parked far enough away from the village. That was Rotor's voice. She looked up to find the walrus leaning into the open passenger's side window.  
  
"Having trouble gettin' the engine to start?" he asked, voice neutral as always. Bunnie took more notice of what he didn't ask: why she looked so forlorn, or why she was even trying to leave in the first place. It was clear that he wanted to, but Rotor was always mindful of his friends' feelings. It was one of his more endearing traits.  
  
It was a struggle to keep her voice under control, but this time she won. "Yeah, that darn thing just won't turn on."  
  
"No problem. I'll take a look for you."  
  
With that, Rotor was gone, circling around to the front of the sled. He was hidden behind the hood for several seconds. Within moments, the hood shut again, and he was back."  
  
"Try it now," he suggested.  
  
Bunnie pressed the ignition again, and the engine obediently started, as if it would have taken offense to the suggestion that it had refused to do so moments earlier. She heaved a sigh of relief. "Thanks, Rotor," she said hesitantly.  
  
"It was just a loose connection, that's all." His gaze fell reluctantly to the back of the sled. "Going out to pick up something?" he asked, carefully innocent.  
  
Bunnie shook her head slowly. "Why d'ya ask?"  
  
"Well... it's just that you don't have any supplies loaded," he hiked a thumb towards the empty cargo bed. "We usually just use these for hauling so I just figured..."  
  
"No, no, it's nothing like that," Bunnie was overcome by a sudden urge to bury her head in her arms again. "Ah just have to... to git out of here."  
  
"What? Why?" Rotor didn't bother to mask his concern this time.  
  
"You won't understand if Ah told you." Bunnie got ready to move towards the gear shift, but stopped when she felt Rotor's hand fall on top of hers.  
  
"Maybe, but the very least I could do is try."  
  
Bunnie was at once struck by the sincerity in his voice. She took a deep breath, and asked herself again if she was really ready to do this. The answer that came back, of course, was no, but choice wasn't really an option here.  
  
"There's something in my leg, Rotor," she said, tapping the hard metal exterior of what had once been her right calf, "Ah'm not too sure how it works, but Ah know enough to be scared. It's called the Laurentis nodule, and it has a built-in transmitter." She sighed. "A couple days ago, Robotnik finally figured out how to remote-activate it. If Ah don't get out of here, now, he's gonna find me, and he's gonna find Knothole." She didn't mention Drizit.  
  
Rotor's face grew more pale with each word.  
  
"And... either way, he's gonna find me. Ah can't hide any longer."  
  
"I don't know what to say. That's- that's terrible!"  
  
"Ah know! But Ah can't do anything about it! Not here!"  
  
"Where will you go, then?" Rotor asked urgently.  
  
"Lower Mobius. Ah think there's someone down there who can help me uninstall the rotten thing," she said, emphasing the 'think'.  
  
"Take me with you."  
  
"Huh?" Bunnie, distraught as she was, was caught off-guard.  
  
Whatever worry he had masked before slipped onto his features all at once. "I wanna help; I can't just stand back and do nothing. Take me with you."  
  
"Ah appreciate the offer, believe me Ah do," she started, feeling extraordinarily awkward, "But... this... Ah can't let ya take that risk. If Robotnik's gonna find me no matter what, if you're around, he'll find you too. It's too dangerous to follow me."  
  
Rotor frowned, looking down. For a moment, she thought that he had run out of things to say; maybe he had. "You almost make it sound as if your life isn't worth the effort."  
  
Bunnie's face crumpled. "If Ah'm doomed either way, it isn't!" Her hand came agonizingly close to the cargo sled's gear shift. All she had to do was slip into drive, and Rotor couldn't stop her from leaving. Yet she couldn't bring herself to do it. "Just go back to the rest of the Freedom Fighters. They need you. They don't need me."  
  
"Don't say that! We do need you," he insisted. "Please. You said yourself that there was at least a chance. Maybe whoever you're lookin' for down in Lower Mobius could use a skilled mechanic."  
  
Bunnie couldn't bring herself to meet Rotor's gaze. Instead, she looked back down at the sled's steering column.  
  
Rotor's hand never budged an inch, still resting atop of hers. "Bunnie... ever since that... day, two years ago, I've looked after you, made sure that your robotic components remained functional. I know your systems better than anyone here, better than ever you." His voice was pleading now. "Let me try."  
  
The walrus had always been there for her, she realized. He had always been the first one on the scene when something had gone wrong, the one who always could make everything better, without fail. Rotor's words had backfired on him, though, being more of a deterrent than anything else. The thought almost came as a shock to her: she cared for him so much that she didn't want to see him die alongside her when Robotnik finally came.  
  
Before he had found her, though, she had been confident that she could leave behind her home, friends and family, of ten years. It wouldn't be easy just driving away, but she though she could do it. Now, though, with an aspect of that family right there, knowing what she was going through, she couldn't bring herself to leave him behind.  
  
"Stars forgive me for doing this but..." she took her hand away from the gear shift, and patted the seat beside her. "Hop in."  
  
Rotor nodded, and took the seat. He hesitated again, the inescapable aura of teenage awkwardness still hovering around him. "Thanks."  
  
"Welcome, Ah'm sure." Finally, she took the sled out of park. Below the passenger cabin, hover engines rumbled a little louder. "And if Ah didn't take you, Ah suppose you'd just run back to Sonic and Sally, try to get them to chase and stop me, right?"  
  
He nodded, without smiling.  
  
***  
  
"What of the search, Snively? How much progress has been made?"  
  
Snively snapped to attention. For the past hour, Robotnik had been sitting quietly on the throne nearby, broodingly silent. At no time, though, did he ever allow himself to be lulled into a false sense of security. He had learned by now that a silent Ivo Robotnik could perhaps be the most dangerous of all.  
  
Instinctively, he scanned through a list of numbers nearby and wasted no time giving an answer. "Thirty-seven percent of all the possible combinations have now been tested, with still no response from the rabbit's transmitter, sir."  
  
Numbers ticked by on a nearby screen. Each second, the city's powerful transmitters were directing thousands of such combinations outward, hoping to stumble on to the correct code by chance. Laurentis had made sure that his codes were long and completely random, but even they couldn't hope to stand up against Robotropolis's powerful computers for long.  
  
Snively made some quick mental calculations. "If all goes at due speed, and accounting for the numbers we've already tried, there is a fifty percent chance of finding the correct code within the next nine hours."  
  
Robotnik's own roboticized arm scratched his chin thoughtfully. Snively was all but confident that he had slipped into another one of his long silences when he spoke again.  
  
"What is nine hours compared with two years?"  
  
"I'm sorry, sir?" Snively asked, mindfully subservient, as always.  
  
"I've been waiting over two years for this, Snively. Two long years. They've worn my patience *very* thin."  
  
"Well, I'm sorry, sir, but the machines are incapable of trying these codes any faster-"  
  
"I can wait another nine hours, though. Oh, yes, another nine hours will just make finding her just that much more rewarding." Snively made sure to nod at all the appropriate places. "Just think. If we're lucky enough, we might be able to get some of her friends, too."  
  
"It is very likely that she'll be in Knothole when the transmitter activates," Snively confirmed. *But knowing your luck, I wouldn't count on it,* he added silently.  
  
It was as if Robotnik could read his mind. "I just want her, now. The others would merely be a bonus. The rabbit has come to represent every one of weakness: my own technology turned against me. I want the bitch crushed, the business finished." He heaved his massive form off the throne. "Contact me the instant you discover the correct code, Snively."  
  
"Yes, sir. Where will you be, sir?"  
  
Robotnik growled. "Tending the roboticizer."  
  
***  
  
There it was, just below the cargo sled. She could see wandering villagers moving about, occasionally glancing up at the sled as it flew overhead. Even though the ground grew more and more distant, she could still see ripples appear in the power ring grotto, kicked up by wind from the sled's hover engines. It was difficult to comprehend the fact that this was the last time she would ever see Knothole.  
  
Slowly, the thatched-roof huts slipped further and further away behind them, disappearing behind the thick green canopy of the Great Forest. She tried to concentrate on steering the sled, but kept looking back over her shoulder, trying to catch one last glimpse of her home. It became more and more difficult to see anything of it.  
  
Eventually there were only trees.  
  
The sled shuddered in mid-air, the steering column responding to a trembling in her arm. She took a deep breath and steadied it. Rotor, in the passenger seat, couldn't have helped but notice it, but he didn't say anything.  
  
"How long do you think we have until we reach Lower Mobius?" Bunnie asked.  
  
Rotor glanced out the window. "Without any cargo to weigh us down, we're moving at a pretty nice clip. Maybe an hour, hour-and-a-half until we reach the first access point to the city?"  
  
"Sounds about right," Bunnie nodded. As doubtful as she was about Rotor risking his life to accompany her, she had to admit that she was glad to have at least some aspect of her old home with her. His presence was reassuring, calming.  
  
"We'll find some way to beat this, whatever it is," he said, trying and failing to rally her spirits.  
  
She shook her head. "Y'all don't even know what you're up against, Rotor."  
  
"Why don't you tell me, then?"  
  
"About the Laurentis nodule? Ah- Ah can't." The years-old fear that had been bubbling inside her suddenly grew stronger. She knew from her nightmares that this would be one of the worst parts. Telling them.  
  
"Please, Bunnie. No one will be able to help you fight this if you don't tell anybody what it is."  
  
And he was right, she knew. She came close to hating him for that. 


	2. Roboticization

What had almost happened to her two years ago was no secret. The Freedom Fighters were all only fourteen years old back then, their tactics far more amateurish. It had been a careless mistake made during a raid that had gotten her captured. She had forgotten to check the alleyway behind the factory for hidden camera orbs. That was all.  
  
One little mistake, and the next thing she knew, was being thrown to the ground in front of Ivo Robotnik. The small of her back tingled from the SWATbot's stun blast. A quick glance around the room had told her everything she needed to know. She had been brought to the roboticizer chamber.  
  
Horror immediately numbed her mind. Upon her slight gasp, Robotnik turned around, as if spotting her for the first time.  
  
"Well, you've been rather slow to regain consciousness," he said, musing, "Almost as if you didn't want to." His massive stomach quivered in what Bunnie could only assume was laughter. "Can't say I blame you."  
  
Escape came quickly to mind. She tried to get up, get ready to run, but a SWATbot's thick metallic hand shoved her back down to the ground.  
  
"Only fourteen years old, and already engaging in guerrilla warfare. Aren't you a little young for these rebellion games?"  
  
"Ain't ya a little old to be a megalomaniac?" she shot back.  
  
"Humor as a defense mechanism. I like it. None of my robots are capable of producing so much as a satisfying scream of pain, and hearing Snively's whines does tend to get on the nerves after a while. It's good to hear a fresh reaction every once in a while." He gestured towards the glass tube behind him. "As you no doubt know, humor is one of the first things that goes when someone steps into that chamber."  
  
She had guessed from her presence her that that was the fate the fat man had in store for her, but hearing it spoken only confirmed her fear. The yawning pit growing in her stomach grow larger; she said nothing.  
  
"It doesn't have to end like that, of course," he said. His lips twitched, as if he were having trouble keeping a straight face. "We can resolve this like peaceable beings, with both of us leaving this room intact."  
  
Here it comes, she thought. The old ploy of promising freedom to prisoners. if only they talked. She knew she was strong enough to resist it, but some traitorous part of her wished she weren't.  
  
"You band of adolescent furs are beginning to become a minor annoyance. Tell me about your friends, and where they are, and I'll let you go free."  
  
"Lahk hell you will." The strength of her voice surprised her. She didn't feel anywhere near that brave.  
  
"I've done some identity tracing while you were unconscious. I know who you are, Bunnie. More importantly, I know who your family is." Again, the twitch. "Would the names Percy and Diedre mean anything to you?"  
  
Bunnie's defenses were instantly shattered. She felt the color drain from her face.  
  
"I can have them brought here, you know. I can deroboticize them, make you all one big, happy family again."  
  
The traitorous part of Bunnie screamed at her that he was telling the truth, as if just saying it would make it so. Her sane half knew better, but that didn't stop her from wishing. The image of her parents simply overwhelmed her senses.  
  
Robotnik could hardly avoided noticing her shock, and was taking full advantage of it. "All you have to do is say a single word, and they'll-"  
  
Bunnie's shock and fear quickly turned to rage. How dare that creature invoke the names of her parents! On her hands and knees, she scrambled forward too quickly for the SWATbots to follow. Once clear of them, she took two fast steps forward and planted her foot in Robotnik's groin.  
  
He bellowed in surprise, and staggered backwards. Bunnie managed to get in another sucker punch to his stomach before two solid metal SWATbot hands seized her arms. She fought against them bitterly, struggling to inflict more pain on the fat man. His face was screwed up in pain, cheeks burning a bright cherry red. The blow must have been more torturous then Bunnie had thought.  
  
Good.  
  
When he finally was able to steady himself, his breath came out in ragged gasps. Whether it was pain, or anger, or a combination of both Bunnie couldn't tell. "That... was a mistake."  
  
He drew back his metallic left fist. Bunnie braced herself.  
  
"A very big mistake."  
  
All the bracing in the world couldn't make it hurt less. She didn't even see his arm move; she just felt something crashing against her cheek, and her neck snapping back. If it weren't for the SWATbots holding her up, she would've collapsed.  
  
Robotnik got ready to land another blow, then seemed to change his mind. "No, no. I have something special in store for you." He hobbled over to a console, and stabbed a button. Bunnie's pain-fazed mind recognized it as one of the city's communication ports.  
  
"Snively?" he spoke into it. A moment later his nephew's shrill voice responded.  
  
"Yes, sir?"  
  
"Come down to the roboticizer chamber. I'll need your help modifying the equipment."  
  
"Modifying it for what, sir?"  
  
"Do you remember finding the old laboratory ledgers last month, Snively? Especially the records of Sir Charles's assistant, Laurentis, and his ideas for additions to the roboticizer machine?"  
  
"Yes, sir."  
  
Robotnik glared at Bunnie. The sheer animosity burning in his eyes frightened her badly. "I just found a suitable test subject."  
  
She wasn't entirely sure of what happened next; either the concussion had affected her memories, or she had repressed them. She suspected the former because the next thing she remembered seeing was an image she was intimately familiar with through the medium of nightmare.  
  
The glass walls of the roboticization chamber slid shut around her, sealing tightly to the floor.  
  
She was trapped.  
  
Bunnie pounded uselessly against the walls of her prison, not caring if Robotnik was enjoying her terror.  
  
Had this been what it was like her friends, her family? This had been the last thing they'd even seen as flesh-and-blood Mobians. This would be the last thing *she* would see, too.  
  
Snively's voice sounded muffled through the glass cage, but she could still make out his words. "The subject is a-go for phase 1 Laurentis roboticization."  
  
"Good." The curvature of the glass distorted Robotnik's grin into an even more gruesome shape. "Well, rabbit, if this works, you'll be my servant for eternity. If it doesn't... well, you won't be so lucky. I'd pray that it works if I were you. Go ahead and activate, Snively."  
  
Bunnie was aware of nothing more than the racing of her mind and the trembling of her jaw.  
  
This couldn't be happening. Not like this. Her life couldn't be over so fast. She was only fourteen. Something like life couldn't be destroyed in a matter of seconds.  
  
A glow began to build in the machinery poised far above her head.  
  
This couldn't be happening, she thought again.  
  
This couldn't be-  
  
Green light stabbed down into her heart.  
  
The immediate sensation of the roboticizer instantly overcame her disbelief. The muscles in her left arm and legs seized and tightened, her bones suddenly seemed frozen. It was as if the marrow had turned into ice, and the ice was pushing outward, crushing the bone with an incredible pressure. The ice expanded throughout her arm until she felt that her skin would burst. Very soon even the skin disappeared.  
  
Her mouth opened in a wordless scream, voice struggling to make itself heard above the horrendous roar of the roboticizer's engines. The pain of the entire operation was incredible.  
  
And then suddenly it was over.  
  
Green-tinted, foul-smelling smoke swirled around her form, unable to disperse in the airtight chamber. It stifled her breathing even more than the fear that gripped her heart.  
  
For a moment, Bunnie was conscious of nothing. Gradually, sensation returned. She could see the cold tint of the metal shealth that had engulfed her leg. No. it wasn't a shealth; it *was* her leg. She had been roboticized, joined the legions of Robotnik's victims.  
  
Then she heard her own sobbing.  
  
Her sobbing?  
  
She looked up confused, suddenly aware of the sensation of damp fur clinging to her face. The roboticization hadn't been completed. Her face, torso, and right arm were still flesh. More importantly, her will still controlled her actions.  
  
Something had gone wrong, or hadn't been completed, and Bunnie wasn't sure what.  
  
The chamber hissed open, releasing the foul air into the room beyond. Robotnik towered over her.  
  
"Phase 1 has been completed, sir. As soon as the Laurentis nodule is properly configured, we'll be free to move on to phase 2. That will complete the roboticization process."  
  
Bunnie looked up, trying to make sense of a world that had gone insane, a world that hated her. "What the hoo-hah?"  
  
The backhand came quickly, knocking her to the ground and dazing whatever scraps of her senses remained.  
  
Too stunned to move, she could only watch as Robotnik approached, and casually flipped opened a panel on her leg. *Opened her leg!*  
  
Humming to himself, he casually slipped a knife out of his pocket, and thumbed a switch on its handle. The blade began to vibrate softly, glow with a dull blue sheen. Glow? Bunnie didn't have the time to reflect on its meaning or purpose before he plunged it into the panel.  
  
A wrenching pain stabbed up her spine, and her new leg jerked reflexively. Robotnik held it steadfast, holding the glowing blade inside the panel and twisting it, as if adjusting something. After a moment, he removed the blade and switched it off. The glow faded in a matter of seconds, slowly bleaching away the electric blue aura.  
  
Bunnie caught a glimpse of a cylindrical object, perched among the wiring and hydraulics of her right leg, glowing with the same blue color, before he snapped the panel shut again.  
  
"Very well, Snively. We're ready to begin phase 2."  
  
The roboticizer snapped shut once more. What cruel twist of fate was this? It was happening, again. She was going to be roboticized, this time for good.  
  
"Let me double-check the nodule's configuration," she heard Snively say.  
  
"No, Snively, I don't want to wait. Just finish roboticizing this bitch, now."  
  
"Sir, if the nodule isn't properly configured, the feedback loop could destroy-"  
  
Alarm sirens punctured the air, without warning. Bunnie was already too terrified to be frightened any further. The volume of the racket ached her already strained eardrums.  
  
"What is this? Report?" She heard, rather than saw, the pair of SWATbots approach.  
  
"SECURITY ALERT, CASTLE ENTRANCE."  
  
"What's the problem?"  
  
"A FREEDOM FIGHTER HAS BREACHED FRONT DOOR SECURITY, AND IS APPROACHING THIS SECTOR."  
  
"They're probably trying to rescue the rabbit," Snively pointed out.  
  
"I *know* that!" Robotnik leveled a finger at the SWATbot's chest. "Scramble local patrols. Prepare an ambush to greet the newcomer. Shoot to kill." His cape billowed in the air as he spun around to face Snively again. "And you, activate the roboticizer, now!"  
  
Snively frantically grappled with the roboticizer's controls. The machinery perched over Bunnie's head whirred to life. It was going to happen again.  
  
A welcome voice pierced the glass chamber.  
  
"Prepare an ambush? Man, I could juice to Knothole and back in the time it takes you to do that."  
  
"Shoot the hedgehog!"  
  
The glass cage distorted Bunnie's view too much to be able to make sense of anything. All she knew was that a long silence followed the sound of twin laser discharges.  
  
After a moment a SWATbot's head clattered to the ground next to the roboticizer.  
  
"When ya gonna learn, Robuttnik? Light speed ain't got nothin' on me."  
  
"If that were true you would've gotten here in time to save your friend."  
  
Just like before, a green glow began to build in the machinery above her head.  
  
Fear tried to choke back her words, but she was strong enough to fight it. Her hands, including her newly metal fist, pounded uselessly against the glass. "Sonic!"  
  
"Bunnie!"  
  
The beam thrust down from the ceiling, but it was different this time. The beam was thinner, tighter, and more directed. It leapt directly into her roboticized right leg, right into the panel that Robotnik had opened. The beam seemed to be passing through the metal itself, striking something within. As she watched, her metal arms and legs buckled and changed shape, grew thicker.  
  
The glass tube shattered, and something blue knocked her to the floor outside. The next thing she was aware of was lying on her back amongst scattered glass shards. Sonic had landed roughly on his side next to her.  
  
"Bunnie? Are you-" His eyes immediately fell on her limbs. "What? But I thought that-"  
  
A laser blast exploded against the deck plating, and then another. More SWATbots had been scrambled, and had burst into the room.  
  
Bunnie didn't pay attention. She only looked bleakly at her metal arm.  
  
Sonic glared up at Robotnik, a malice to compete with the fat man's burning in his eyes. For a moment, he looked as though he was getting ready to buzz-saw straight through his ribcage.  
  
A third SWATbot entered, and a fourth. "Shoot the beasts!"  
  
"One day you're gonna pay for this Robuttnik! One day!"  
  
Bunnie felt Sonic grab her by her right arm, and then the world became a blur that didn't stop until they were back in Knothole village.  
  
Adjusting to life afterwards was more of a struggle then any fight with Robotnik had ever been. The prospect of waking up each day to face limbs that weren't her own was daunting, and had overwhelmed her on more than one occasion. The worst part had been the day she forgotten about her unnatural strength and nearly crushed little Tails' skull.  
  
She had been so busy trying to wrench the bolt out of the stolen pylon that she hadn't seen him come up behind her. The bolt was jammed; when she pulled on it, it twisted and snapped in half. Her left elbow flew backwards with enough force to splinter and crack the hut's wall. If the kitsune hadn't chosen that exact moment to duck, the sheer force of the blow would have caved his face in. She had nearly killed him. If that had happened, she didn't know what she would've done, nor did she want to.  
  
After that, she was often struck by the thought that if her arm was strong enough to kill him, maybe the same blow would be just as effective against her own skull.  
  
At least with those difficulties, she had a shoulder to lean on, someone to talk to. Sally had been a good friend throughout all of it, and without her Bunnie knew she probably wouldn't have been able to control her suicidal fantasies.  
  
They still haunted her for almost a year, though, and it showed. It wasn't possible to live in a village as small as Knothole without overhearing some casual gossip. They didn't blame her for taking the loss of her limbs so hard. But they couldn't have known that was the whole story. Bunnie had never told them about "Laurentis", and still couldn't bring herself to.  
  
She had known almost straightaway that her roboticization was unusual; something that none of her friends, not even Rotor, picked up on. She was physically stronger that the average roboticized Mobian, much stronger. Her limbs were thicker than those of most roboticizer victims as well; most worker bots' arms and legs were thin as rods, but hers were nearly twice of the volume of the original limbs. It was only natural to assume that these abnormalities were somehow related to the "Laurentis" process.  
  
Sally was as attached to her hand-held computer two years ago as she was now, but she still couldn't keep watch over it forever. Early one evening, on a day when she was feeling worse than usual, Bunnie grabbed Nicole and stole away into the Great Forest, and asked her to search her data banks for anything or anybody matching the name Laurentis. It was from Nicole that she learned the full story behind the unusual roboticization process.  
  
Laurentis had originally been an undergraduate apprentice in one of Mobotropolis's medical science research laboratories. More specifically, the laboratory run by Sir Charles Hedgehog, Sonic's uncle and the original inventor of the roboticizer device. Most of the old storage files Nicole had stored on her hard drive mentioned him only in passing, or only listed him on the old payroll records. Laurentis had worked with Sir Charles in creating the roboticizer, but that useless piece of information was about all Bunnie could find. For a while, she thought she'd hit a dead end.  
  
It was only when she started looking into the design history of the roboticizer itself that she found Laurentis's contribution to the project.  
  
The biggest obstacle in development project was the roboticizer beam's resolution. Once a being's flesh had been transmuted to metal, it took an incredible amount of complex machinery and moving parts, many of them very small, to keep the being inside alive. Aortal passages and arteries were many times smaller than anything the roboticizer could accurately recreate. The roboticizer simply didn't have the precision necessary to safely create anything microscopic.  
  
As always, Sir Charles found a work-around, but not without making some compromises. Because of the impossibility of accurately transmuting muscle tissue, the strength of any person roboticized would be decreased. Due to the same difficulties in recreating arterial passages, endurance and oxygen distribution would also suffer.  
  
Laurentis thought he had found a better way. He came forward to Sir Charles with a unique idea. He proposed using the roboticizer to only to transmute part of the body to metal with a patient's first exposure to the beam. Within the patient, the roboticizer itself would create a nodule that would direct the final half of the roboticization process.  
  
When the roboticizer was activated again, to complete the process, the beam itself would strike the nodule. The nodule would then be able to distribute and direct the beam's potent energies with far greater accuracy. The roboticization process itself would be far more precise, and able to recreate complex organics that the machine would otherwise struggle with.  
  
With the nodule, which Laurentis named after himself, installed, the muscle and arterial passages could be precisely duplicated. A patient's strength would acutely increase, as would endurance. After the roboticizer had been activated the second time, they would have physical strength far in advance of the original roboticizer could ever do.  
  
Sir Charles had declined Laurentis's proposal, on the grounds that they were medical researchers out to save lives, not augment a patient's strength. Perhaps, he said, after the roboticizer had come into wider circulation, they could worry about it. Laurentis had reluctantly agreed, and set his plans aside. There were no further records of the Laurentis nodule before the coup.  
  
When Bunnie had been originally roboticized, she had been in the chamber just long enough for the Laurentis nodule to augment the strength of the limbs that had already been turned to metal, and nothing else, fortunately.  
  
The terrifying part had come when she discovered that the Laurentis nodule, the device now buried in her right leg, had a dual purpose.  
  
It's main purpose had been to tap and redirect the roboticizer's beam. But in order to even have access to the beam, the roboticizer itself had to know exactly where the nodule was, in order to even contact it. That's why the transmitter was built into the nodule.  
  
The transmitter was a powerful beacon, designed to activate when the roboticizer was ready for phase 2 of the Laurentis roboticization. Its signal strength was strong, almost unnecessarily strong.  
  
Mouth growing dry, Bunnie had asked Nicole if the nodule's beacon could be remote-activated, not by the roboticizer, but by Robotnik himself, in order to find her.  
  
Nicole had answered with an emotionless affirmative.  
  
Bunnie's one solace through those first, terrifying days was the fact that Laurentis and Sir Charles had kept most of their data at the highest possible encryption. It was conceivable that Robotnik had found out about the Laurentis process itself, but not how to activate the beacon. Conceivable, but not likely, Nicole had said.  
  
Her first thought had been that her friends could help her. They had helped her through everything so far, the loss of her family, her roboticization, everything. They could handle this, too. She ran back to the village as fast as she could.  
  
"Sally-girl, Ah-" she stopped short.  
  
Sally looked up, soft blue eyes staring thoughtfully at her friend. "Yes, Bunnie? What is it?"  
  
Bunnie was suddenly struck by a appalling image. Knowing about the transmitter in her leg, her friends and family here at Knothole would have no choice but to cast her out. With the transmitter, she was nothing but a ticking time bomb, a danger not only to herself but to them. There wasn't anything any of them could do. but she was sure that if they found out, she'd be exiled. A lump formed in her throat. She couldn't bear that.  
  
"Bunnie?"  
  
Bunnie kept hearing the word 'exile', over and over. Standing there, looking at Sally, she knew that she didn't have to strength to say it.  
  
"Ah just wanted to return Nicole. Ah borrowed her. to look something up."  
  
Sally's eyes lighted upon the hand-held computer. "There she is! I've been looking all over for her!" She took Nicole and clipped the computer gingerly back into her boot. Irritation briefly flared in her eyes when she looked back at Bunnie. "You know, you could've asked if you wanted to use her."  
  
"Ah'm sorry-"  
  
Bunnie turned and ran, not caring what Sally made of that, not caring how many stares she attracted throughout the village, just ran and ran towards her cabin and slammed the door shut.  
  
Why couldn't she have told Sally? They'd be right to exile her. As long as the transmitter remained in her leg, she was a threat to them. A threat and nothing more. The instant Robotnik found a way to activate the Laurentis nodule's transmitter, he would know where Knothole is and they'd all be dead.  
  
She didn't have the strength to say it. That was the simple answer. She didn't have to willpower to tell them, and risk being forced out of the only family she knew. Her fear, her damnable selfish fear, kept telling her that it was worth risking their lives to stay here. That voice was so strong that she couldn't help but to obey it.  
  
It was the first time Bunnie could ever remember truly hating herself.  
  
She knew that it was wrong to do this. Her life alone wasn't worth all of theirs. She knew it was wrong but she couldn't help herself.  
  
Bunnie collapsed, sobbing, into her bunk. Sleep didn't come easy, but when it came, it was haunted by the most horrible nightmares. Images of a fleet of hover units, hovering impassively over the burning wreckage of Knothole village, herself the only survivor of Robotnik's holocaust.  
  
Everywhere she looked, she saw the corpses of her friends, dead empty eyes staring at her accusingly, cold fingers pointing. Their mouths half- open in cries of suspicion, all directed at her. Sally, lying half-buried in the smoldering rubble of her hut, her hand and face the only things protruding. Rosie, mouth lolling open as if silently asking how she could do this to them. Hadn't she been raised to be a good person? A good person wouldn't do this to her friends. Empty eyes, staring, pointing fingers. Her fault. Everywhere she looked.  
  
Over in the center of the village, one of them was standing. It was Tails. The eight-year-old kitsune was just as dead and motionless as the rest of them, but somehow his body was able to stay propped up on two feet. He just stood there, finger leveled at her like all the others. His face was caved in: something the size and shape of Bunnie's left elbow had struck him, making his expression all but unreadable. Blood oozed down what remained of his face. Something thicker, pink and gray at the same time, followed it down. His finger arched straight towards her; it was the only thing about him that moved. It followed her, always pointing at her wherever she moved.  
  
As she watched helplessly, the corpse swayed gently forward until it lost whatever balance it had, and fell lifelessly to the ground. His face struck the dirt at the same instant that a resonant chime sounded, as if a distant clocktower had struck an hour. The note hung in the air for several moments upon the still scene, finality itself come to confront her.  
  
Bunnie forced herself awake, choking back a scream.  
  
The nightmare never went away as the days passed, but neither did Robotnik's fleet come to Knothole. In waited in painful suspense for weeks, never knowing when she woke up if today was the day Robotnik was going to find her. Always hating herself for never telling anyone, but unable to bring herself to share her misery.  
  
Weeks turned into months, and, with time, the fear faded. It never disappeared, but it faded. After almost a year had passed, she allowed herself to believe that it would never happen. At least, her waking self did.  
  
If Robotnik hadn't found out how to activate the transmitter yet, she supposed, maybe he never would. Whatever the cause, whatever the reason, the transmitter had never been activated. Bunnie gave many silent thanks to Uncle Chuck and "Laurentis" for using encryptions of as high an order as they did.  
  
No matter how sure she was that it would never happen, though, the nightmares still continued to haunt her. The recurring nightmare about the dead Knothole village had a new element, though, at the end, just as the clocktower chime sounded when Tails' corpse hit the dirt. A glass tube would lower from the sky, capturing her inside, and the roboticization commence again. Because no matter what happened otherwise, the instant the transmitter was activated, she was as good as dead.  
  
Now, after two years of waiting, her nightmare had finally come to pass. If Drizit was right, the clock was ticking down. The Laurentis transmitter was going to be activated, a bright beacon shining throughout the sky, and inexorably leading Robotnik to her.  
  
***  
  
More chapters to come... 


	3. The Search

Endless expanses of forest continually passed by below the speeding cargo sled. A brief flicker of smog on the horizon gave away the position of Robotropolis itself. The city was getting closer.  
  
"And that's the whole story, everything Ah know." Bunnie checked the dashboard guages, using it as an excuse to pause and collect her thoughts. "Ah still can't believe that Ah just told you."  
  
Rotor wasn't very good at concealing his emotions. It was clear that he was horrified, even though he tried not to show it.  
  
"Do you hate me?" The question was fast, simple.  
  
"What? No - of course not!"  
  
Bunnie couldn't help but think that he ought to.  
  
"About ten minutes away from the Lower Mobius access tunnel," she said bleakly, for lack of anything else to say. For several moments, the only noise in the sled's passenger cabin was the steady hum of the hover engines.  
  
Rotor stroked his chin thoughtfully, staring out the side window. "You know, that does explain a lot of things, though. Like your strength."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"I always just chalked it up to normal variations in system specs that exist in everyone that's been roboticized, but even then, you were always more than a little unusual." Rotor stared at her false left arm; he had slipped into full mechanic mode. "Most worker bots just have limbs that are nothing more than rods with joints attached. Your left arm's far too modular, too large, compared to any other worker bot out there. The legs are too bulky, too thick."  
  
"Gee, thanks," Bunnie said dryly.  
  
"I didn't mean it like that," Rotor said quickly. "I meant that the actual volume of your roboticized legs is too large. Much more complex components than any other worker bot I've had a chance to examine."  
  
"It was the Laurentis roboticization that did that," she said balefully.  
  
"Now, if Laurentis process is able to transmute muscle tissue with far more accuracy than a normal roboticizer - and give you more endurance through better oxygen distribution to boot - you'd have much more physical power than an ordinary worker bot." Rotor was completely absorbed in putting the pieces of the puzzle together. "Too many things are starting to make sense now. I remember back when we went to the crystal mine. You overpowered Uncle Chuck, another worker bot, using only one of your arms while he used both of his."  
  
Bunnie peered out at the horizon, searching for the cave that would lead them into Lower Mobius. In reality it was just an excuse not to let her eyes meet his. She had wondered how long it would be before somebody figured it out.  
  
"Or back when the rocket booster fell near Knothole," Rotor pressed on. "It would've taken a team of ordinary worker bots to lift that thing to even a slight angle. I always knew that was odd, but I never even figured that. something so horrible was behind it."  
  
There, a small rocky crag just beyond a dense grove of trees. A cave hidden in there would take them directly to the old sewers, the system of tunnels which hid the underground city. Bunnie stared at it resolutely, determined not to let Rotor see the expression on her face at that moment. She swallowed down the lump in her throat.  
  
Rotor's hand came to rest on Bunnie's organic arm. It felt warm. "Don't worry, Bunnie. We'll find a way to beat this transmitter, I'm sure of it. Laurentis will know."  
  
"If he is down there," Bunnie sighed. "And if there is a way to uninstall it. Oh, Rotor, Ah want to believe you, but..."  
  
"Don't say it. We will find a way."  
  
Bunnie allowed piloting the sled to distract her from the conversation. She curved the cargo sled downward in a graceful arc, and into the cave.  
  
They plunged into darkness.  
  
***  
  
The cargo sled slipped silently through the dark caves and unlit tunnels of the old sewer system, moving much slower than they had above ground, but because of the proximity of the rock walls seeming to go much faster. The bright beam of the sled's hood-mounted spotlight splashed across the surfaces ahead, guiding Bunnie around gentle curves and slopes in the tunnel.  
  
The cargo sled's black radio handset reminded Bunnie, absurdly, of a type of licorice jellybean she had enjoyed as a kid. She picked it up. Like everything else in Lower Mobius, its entrances had become more formalized and secure.  
  
She had only been to the underground city once in her life, on a trading run with Sally and Rotor, and had a bit of a struggle remembering the careful procedures. "This is supply sled KH-3 asking for clearance, trading code breaker-zero-six, over."  
  
The radio fizzed with empty static for a moment before a voice answered. "LM militia post seven monitoring your course, identity and origins confirmed. You are approaching our checkpoint. Please begin decelerating now."  
  
Braking jets fired in response to Bunnie's touch. The cargo sled rounded one last corner, then slowed to a stop before a set of reinforced double doors. The sewers were broodingly silent for a long moment.  
  
With a resounding hiss that was as startling in its abruptness as well as volume, dilapidated machinery churned to life, and the massive doors ground open.  
  
Up until this point the sewer had been dark and lifeless, faded and stained walls creating an atmosphere of dank depression that Bunnie found distasteful. That appearance ended immediately beyond the open doors. The walls on the other side were smoother, clean and well-lit. Lanterns were strung around the circular walls and ceilings like so many holiday decorations. A pair of platforms had been constructed on either side of the tunnel, either one holding three people. Each of the them proudly wore the recognizable blue-and-grey uniform of the Lower Mobius militia, and, more prominently, a laser rifle, slung on a strap over the shoulder. One of them had his aimed at the cargo sled, as if he were expecting trouble, but set it down when the doors had opened far enough to fully reveal the vehicle.  
  
Bunnie tapped the engine's accelerator, and let the hover engines push the sled forward. It coasted to a floating stop adjacent to the first guard platform.  
  
She was close enough to see the militiamen's faces. One of them, a colt, held a radio in his hoof. She guessed he was the owner of the voice that had addressed her earlier.  
  
The colt gave her a quizzical look, and held the radio up to his mouth. The sled's speakers cackled to life once more. "You're free to move forward. That city's only another half-kilometer away." He gave an absent wave down the tunnel.  
  
"Actually, Ah wanted to ask you a few questions first."  
  
He nodded absently. It was disorienting to see him that far away talking, yet hear his voice as if he were sitting in the passenger compartment with them. "Go right ahead. If you're looking for directions to the trading center, just head towards the largest cluster of buildings."  
  
"Ah was wondering if you might know someone. Does the name Laurentis mean anything to ya?"  
  
"Not really," the colt admitted. "Of course, even though I've been here for the best part of a year, I still don't know everybody. New faces are arriving all the time. Maybe your Laurentis is one of them"  
  
A year ago, when the Freedom Fighters had first found the underground sanctuary of Lower Mobius, Bunnie wouldn't have believed him. Back then, the city only harbored around three dozen or so scattered refugees from the surface war. It wasn't possible for anyone living down here to not know everyone else.  
  
Ever since having established its first contacts in the outside world, though, Lower Mobius had grown. Any survivors of the coup that the Knothole Freedom Fighters found since then were allowed to travel to the underground city and start new lives there. Establishing the Freedom Fighters network months later had only magnified this effect. Lower Mobius now housed over one hundred and fifty new citizens, with more arriving almost weekly.  
  
With more willing and capable manpower at his disposal, Lower Mobius had blossomed into a true republic under Griff's steady leadership. A small government had been created down here, the first official organization of any kind since the Great War and Robotnik's coup had shattered Mobius over a decade ago.  
  
Since its founding, Lower Mobius had never taken a great part in the revolution ravaging the planet's surface, and was determined to stay out. However, it had become an essential component of the Freedom Fighters' Network's infrastructure. Supplies of all kinds were in abundance here: it primarily served as a market, a place for the warriors to trade and barter for goods. It was a refugee camp as well, allowing anyone who survived the coup to come down and live again, lead lives outside of the war.  
  
The militia had been one of the first established arms of the city's government, and one of the most stable. The rat-bot infestation that had so plagued Lower Mobius since its founding had been wiped out months ago. The abandoned robots simply didn't stand a chance against the well-armed, organized, and relentless assault the city's militia had pitted against them.  
  
"Who might know all the newcomers?" Bunnie asked the soldier.  
  
"Probably anyone who doesn't live at the barracks 24/7 like me," he snorted, a private little joke. "Your best bet is to talk with either Dirk or Griff, though. They'd be the ones who'd know everyone in the city. You won't have much trouble finding them. Usually one or the other comes out to meet incoming traders personally."  
  
"Thanks, sugar," Bunnie said, ignoring the glare the guard shot at her after being called 'sugar', and clicked off the radio. She hesitated a moment before punching the sled's thrusters into gear. The guard post slipped into the distance behind her, and then disappeared.  
  
A drawn-out sigh escaped her lips moments after the tunnel's walls turned to blurs.  
  
"We'll get through this, Bunnie," Rotor said again.  
  
***  
  
There had been several times in the past years when Griff had nearly written off his effort in city-building as nothing more than a practice in sheer futility, days when he was convinced that all of Lower Mobius itself was only weeks away from total collapse. The numerous rat-bot invasions, the shut-down of the energy chamber, the close calls with SWATbot patrols, they'd all been days when he was only a thought away from ordering a permanent evacuation of the city. Days when he was sure that the torture and guilt that had chased him all his life had at last caught up with him.  
  
And then there were days like this.  
  
He stepped off of the porch, out of the shadow cast from the protective umbrella of his home's roof overhang, and into bright, warm glare of the overhead energy crystal. So similar to sunlight. The heat felt good against his furred head, more relaxing and restorative then any amount of sleep in a darkened room could ever be.  
  
Dirt and dust kicked up underneath his feet as he walked forward. The entire surface of the cavern was covered with grit and small rocks like this; ground up into a powder and spread across the ground, they made nice dirt roads. No outcroppings of rock or other loose sediment jabbed up from the ground to trip him. A year ago, such a thought would've been alien.  
  
He strolled casually down the empty road, savoring the quiet. Ever since contacting the outside world, many changes had wracked the city. One of the few things Griff missed about the old times was the silence. It had been impossible back then not to look out a window and see abandoned buildings, emptiness. Now nearly every building was occupied, people were everywhere. Griff enjoyed the company, that was certain, every once in a while the constant noise and chatter began to get to him. Before the coup, he couldn't stand being alone. After spending so many years in the Lower Mobius's empty cavern, though, he craved the solitude. Life had forced upon him a desire for it.  
  
That's why, every morning and sometimes in the evenings, he made it a habit to come to this part of town. It was why he had his own quarters here. It was one of the least inhabited parts of town, and it had one hell of a view.  
  
Griff rounded a corner in the road, and started up a small hill. He stopped once he reached its peak, and looked forward. After a couple moments of just staring, he felt a gentle smile tug the corners of his lips upward.  
  
Nothing short of panoramic in scale, the cityscape of Lower Mobius stretched out in the massive cavern before him. Gray rock buildings lay sprawled amongst twisted and curving streets. The layout of the entire city seemed completely random, roads strewn about with abrupt lack of care, yet all of it seemed to merge into a wonderful mishmash that was more beautiful than any more orderly city could ever manage to be. Griff admitted to himself that he preferred the rock consortium of this city over even the garden-like splendor of old Mobotropolis.  
  
From this distance, he could even make out the blurred forms of far off people wandering through the city, going about their business, just generally living their lives. He still hadn't gotten used to the sight of so many people in his home. When Griff's band of refugees had retreated underground and found the old, abandoned rock structures of this city, they thought that they would never need dream of worrying about living space again. The city itself, although much of it ancient and damaged, had far more space in its buildings then thirty people could ever use. So much had changed since the Expansion. Now that they had over one hundred and fifty people living in the city, they had even had to construct new buildings to accommodate for them all. He could see the current construction project hugging the base of the far cavern wall, a pile of rock and wood just waiting to be made into part of Lower Mobius.  
  
Not even the largest building came close to matching the size or magnificence of the titanic energy crystal. The base supports were latched securely to the cavern's ceiling, keeping the fragile crystal carefully suspended far above the city. Power continually crackled up and down its length, far more intense than anything it had managed before. The piece of the power rock, a gift from the Knothole Freedom Fighters, still effortlessly provided the energy needed to run it. The rock was producing more than enough power to cope with Lower Mobius's expansion, and had never shown any signs of exhausting its near-limitless supply.  
  
The crystal was one of the things that kept morale in such high supply in Lower Mobius. The excess energy it cast off came in the form of heat, and light, so much like sunshine itself. When nighttime came, and power wasn't in such high demand, the glow from the cystal faded slightly. They had *created* their own day and night down in these otherwise pitch dark stone caverns.  
  
Griff stood there at the crest of the hill for a long moment, just staring out and admiring the town. Never even in Mobotropolis could he just stare out at the city, and taste such. contentment. This was the only place he had ever felt at home, felt that he truly belonged. All throughout his life he had been searching for this. He had never fit in with anybody in his childhood; the stigma of ostracism was the only thing he had learned in school. College wasn't much better, neither was the university work afterwards. It didn't help that he craved social interaction so much, yet the best thing he could ever achieve was simple isolation. If he was lucky.  
  
It was a mild irony that it had taken such a violent overthrow of Mobotropolis to find a place like this. He didn't savor it, but only accepted it as such.  
  
Beyond social acceptance, beyond finding someplace where he finally could belong, there was something else that kept Griff so attached to Lower Mobius. He had been the city's leadership since the beginning, so many years ago. Deep inside of him, the old, unused scientist in his personality couldn't help but take pride in his accomplishments. It was a voice he didn't listen to often anymore, but it was there nonetheless.  
  
It looked out at the city, swollen with happy conceit, and said, *Look what I made. Isn't it neat?*  
  
The gentle smile turned into a smirk, both at himself and the voice. He didn't bother chiding himself. He had learned a long time ago that the voice wouldn't respond to it.  
  
He only wished he could stay out here longer, and just admire the city. But responsibility still weighed heavily on him.  
  
Almost hidden beneath the glare of the titanic energy crystal, he could just see the tiny speck moving in towards town from the edge of the cavern. A trail of white-hot thruster exhaust seared the sky behind it. Lower Mobius had visitors, an incoming cargo sled.  
  
Official business had to take precedence over pleasure. After a long sigh, Griff started towards the city square to meet the newcomers.  
  
***  
  
From the air, Bunnie reflected, Lower Mobius hadn't changed much. The cargo sled hovered at position halfway between the city streets below and the cavern roof overhead. Up far enough to see most of the city with a single glance, yet close enough to still be able to make out details.  
  
The only noticeable difference between now and a year ago was the number of people dotting the streets. Over one hundred and fifty people lived here now, the largest refugee outpost in all the Freedom Fighters' Network.  
  
Bunnie had spent most of her life in quiet Knothole village, home to, at most, two dozen people. The only time she could ever remember seeing so many people all in one place was before the coup, back in old Mobotropolis. Her skin prickled uncomfortably at the thought of such a crowd. Isolation was something that had been bred into her by necessity, and anything else made her uneasy, and involuntarily restless.  
  
Rotor was struggling with the same sense of discomfort. If anything, he was far more socially awkward then Bunnie, having trouble coping with even the small number of people back at Knothole. "Sure are a lot of people down there."  
  
"They aren't gonna be there for much longer if we don't hurry up and git out of here," Bunnie said bitterly. "Ah don't want to think about what could happen if the transmitter activates down here."  
  
"The transmitter won't activate," Rotor insisted, stubborn in his optimism. "If Laurentis is down here, we'll find a way to disarm it."  
  
Ordinarily, Bunnie would be the one offering encouragement, shoring up hope in others. It was a role she preferred far more than its counter. But confronting a disaster of this magnitude had drained ever her reserves. "And if he's not, or if he can't?"  
  
"He will."  
  
Bunnie glanced down at the bustling streets of Lower Mobius again, doubt bristling in her eyes. "Oh, Rotor, maybe comin' down here wasn't such a good idea. Ah should've waited by the surface, let you go down alone. at least then we wouldn't lose the city if the worst does happen."  
  
"Bunnie-"  
  
"No, no, maybe even that wouldn't be enough. Robotnik's cagey enough to know that Ah wouldn't be alone. He'd find you, find some way to hurt all of you, just like in mah dreams. Ah know it. Ah should've just left when Ah had the chance, ran as far away as possible, so he couldn't find y'all. Ah should've-"  
  
"Don't say that!"  
  
"-done *anything* except this," she finished sullenly.  
  
"The Bunnie I know wouldn't have just said that," Rotor said. The words came as a shock to her, but not as much as her own.  
  
"Well, than, maybe you really don't know me. Ah've been lyin' to y'all for two years now," she said, challenging. "Would the Bunnie you know have done that?"  
  
"All I know is that the Bunnie I know is one of the strongest individuals I've ever met," Rotor said sincerely, and uncharacteristically eloquently. "And I don't mean physical strength. She has a spirit that someone just can't fake. She's been through so much, lived through things that would've crushed someone else a thousand times over. She's a survivor."  
  
Bunnie felt her expression soften. She looked down uncertainly, gently rubbing the surface of her metal arm.  
  
"She's someone who can survive through this, too. A transmitter alone can't kill her when she's been through everything else. Even if she lets fear and doubt get to her, she'll beat it in the end."  
  
"You don't know how close Ah've come to killing myself over what happened two years ago, do you?"  
  
"No," Rotor admitted, "I don't. I just know that you survived through it all, a feat which not many of us would be up to. You're courageous, Bunnie, courageous enough to conquer this, too."  
  
Bunnie only could only think of one answer. "Ah don't know how many times Ah've had this nightmare since Ah found out about the Laurentis nodule. Now it's actually happening. Ah'm actually livin' my worst nightmare." She paused, trying to control the cracks in her voice. "In *your* worst nightmares, do you ever feel courageous?"  
  
She knew the answer was 'no' just by looking at him. He was still, and for a moment Bunnie thought that he couldn't say anything at all.  
  
"No, you're right, I never am. But... if I can just confront my nightmares by imagining my friends at my side, things are always just a little easier."  
  
Rotor extended his hand across the passenger compartment. Before she even realized it, Bunnie's own hand reached over, and grabbed it tightly.  
  
They sat together for a long moment, just holding hands. Bunnie squeezed hard enough to make her bones ache with the pressure. The touch alone filled her with an almost palpable sensation of strength, and caring support.  
  
"The least we can do is try," Rotor said finally. "Together."  
  
"Y'all are right... of course." Bunnie looked back at the dashboard, trying her best to hide the wet glistening in her eyes.  
  
As she guided the sled towards a smooth landing in the center of Lower Mobius, she gripped the steering column as firm as possible, pretending that it was Rotor's palm.  
  
***  
  
Bunnie cut the engines as they dove down lower, using only the sled's bottom-mounted braking thrusters to coast to a stop a meter above ground level. The sled slowly fell down, at last landing on the surface of the dirt road with a jarring thud.  
  
She had landed the sled in a corner of the city, out-of-the-way of traffic, yet still close to the city's marketplace. Passerby watched them curiously. Visiting trading vehicles were a common enough sight in Lower Mobius, but the city was still isolated enough to receive only two or three visits a week. The empty cargo bed was surely an abnormality as well.  
  
Both passenger compartment doors opened at the same time. Bunnie slid her metal feet to the dust-covered road below. The last time she had ventured down here, the air had been moist enough to make her fur stick. Now, the energy crystal above was producing more than enough heat to burn away the humidity. It was arid and dry out, almost too much so.  
  
She blinked against the sudden glare of the crystal, which was much brighter than it had been behind the tinted windows of the sled's passenger compartment. She raised her arm to shield her eyes just in time to see Rotor step out of the sled. The door slammed shut behind him.  
  
"Well, where should we start?" he asked.  
  
Bunnie glanced around, still squinting against the glare. There was no sign of either Griff or his uniformed boar companion Dirk. Either they hadn't seen the sled land or were still on their way.  
  
This would be awkward, but it would have to be done. "Just by askin' people, Ah guess."  
  
Moving as one, Bunnie and Rotor moved towards the side of the road, where the occasional pedestrian walked by. Once again, Bunnie was glad that Rotor was with her. His gentle eyes concealed a soft strength that was binding and driving all at once.  
  
"Excuse us," Bunnie started, feeling self-conscious at approaching the first stranger she saw, "but would you happen to know someone named Laurentis?"  
  
"Sorry, no."  
  
The next three people had similar replies. Bunnie felt herself begin to lose hope. What if Drizit had been wrong?  
  
"I don't get it," Rotor said, scratching his head. "I thought this town was still small enough for most everybody to know each other."  
  
"It is," Bunnie confirmed, a note of forlorn depression in her voice.  
  
Rotor sensed her gloom, and quickly spoke to cover it. "He's here somewhere. All we have to do is find him."  
  
Thankfully, the unsuccessful search didn't have to go on for much longer before Bunnie spotted the city's leader, Griff walking calmly towards them through the middle of the dirt road. Pedestrians paid him a kind deference, though not gawking. They occasionally tossed him grateful smiles or kind nods. He acknowledged each one of them with a smile of his own. Clearly, Griff was popular around here, and with good reason.  
  
Bunnie had never liked him much herself. First impressions were too hard to get over. She supposed he had atoned himself with his actions since the incident, but whenever she saw him she couldn't help but remember how he had lied to and betrayed everyone in Knothole. He had made a pass at Sally, taken advantage of her. He had used her to steal the power rock from the ring grotto.  
  
And during his short stay in Knothole, every time he saw Bunnie he had done nothing but stare at her robotic limbs. Griff hadn't just been repulsed by her partial roboticization; oh no, she knew that look well enough. It had been as if he were studying her. Mentally dissecting her.  
  
Still, she was more than glad to see him now. If anyone would know who Laurentis was, it was Griff.  
  
Clearly, he recognized the Knothole Freedom Fighters as he approached them. His voice was as charming as ever. "Welcome back, Bunnie, Rotor," he greeted. "As always, the local economy is grateful for your patronage. How can I help you, today? Buying or selling?" His eyes drifted over to the empty cargo sled. "Buying, I see."  
  
"Neither, actually," Rotor said. "We just came to find someone."  
  
"Oh," Griff seemed disappointed, although the impression didn't last for long. "I'd be glad to help you there, too."  
  
Again, Griff looked down, staring unashamedly at her metallic legs just like he had before. For a moment, Griff's eyes turned as hard and cold as steel, as if nothing else in the world existed other than Bunnie's metal limbs. Bunnie felt a shudder ripple up her spine.  
  
She fought against the discomfort. "Um, would you happen to know someone named Laurentis?" When he didn't respond, she prodded again. "A scientist, perhaps?"  
  
Again, the eyes became cold. He pursed his lips into a thin, hard line. She could see the loathing etch itself into his face. Loathing of what, though, she had no clue.  
  
"Laurentis?" he asked, voice not betraying any noticeable emotion.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Now what would you want with that bastard?"  
  
Bunnie was taken aback by the sudden anger in his otherwise calm voice, the way he almost spat the word 'bastard'. Her voice stuttered on the answer. "We think he knows something that might be very important to us."  
  
Griff looked as though he was ready to fire off another fierce retort, but then he looked back at Bunnie's metallic limbs. This time there was no chilly mental dissection. He looked back up.  
  
"Like what?"  
  
"Like the key to saving Bunnie's life," Rotor interjected.  
  
Stony silence.  
  
"Please, if you know something, tell us," the walrus pleaded. "It may be the only way to keep Robotnik from finishing the job he started when he first roboticized her."  
  
"So Robotnik finally found a way to activate the Laurentis nodule's transmitter, huh?" Griff asked. The anger fled his face.  
  
Bunnie felt her jaw drop. "How do you know about that?"  
  
The odd note of sorrow in Griff's voice was impossible not to notice. "I think we'd better have a talk." 


	4. Failure

"Still no sign of either of them, Sal," the hedgehog said, shrugging helplessly. He was too used to being able to solve any problem with a burst of speed. No amount of sprinting, no spin dash, would help them find out where Bunnie and Rotor had disappeared to. The torture on his face was strikingly clear.  
  
To be fair, the disappearance of their fellow Freedom Fighters wasn't the only thing weighing on Sonic's mind. Just an hour ago, the mortally wounded Drizit had slipped into an unconsciousness from which he was unlikely to recover. A death coma. It would be less than a day until the laser wounds finished the job.  
  
"Another mondo problemo," he continued. "I just had Antoine run a supply check. He said that one of the cargo sleds is missing."  
  
"What?"  
  
"It's gone. There are thruster burns on the ground where we parked it last, but they're already hours old."  
  
Sally didn't like any of the implications of that. She bit her lip. "Well, that clinches it. They've run off somewhere, without leaving so much as a note behind."  
  
"What would make them wanna pack up and leave like that?" Sonic asked.  
  
"I don't know," Sally admitted, "but I do have an idea. And its what worries me about all this. The last time I saw Bunnie was when Drizit wanted to talk with her."  
  
"Do you know what he told her?"  
  
"No, I never saw her after she went in. And I can't ask Drizit now." Sally paced anxiously back and forth in her hut, trying to think of something to do, some way to help. It was clear that something bad was happening, but she didn't know what. Whenever the Freedom Fighters were about to go into battle, she always felt a prickling along the edge of her back, a premonition. She felt that prickling now. Even if they didn't know what was coming, Sally decided, the least they could do was prepare for something. "How many people do we have ready for any kind of action?" she asked.  
  
"Not too many," Sonic said. "With Bunnie and Rotor both gone, we don't have that many people here with us in Knothole. Since Ari's out serving as an 'envoy' to the Wolf Pack, that leaves just us, Antoine, Dulcy, and Tails." He grimaced, brushing back the quills on his scalp. "Oh man, this is a major headache."  
  
Sally's frown only grew deeper. "Have Dulcy and Tails make scouting runs over the Great Forest to look for any sign of the cargo sled. And, er, keep Antoine on standby."  
  
"What about me?" Sonic asked anxiously.  
  
"Go down the grotto, and get another power ring. We might need it soon."  
  
"No prob." A gust of air swirled through the hut as the blue blur blasted out the doorway. He was gone.  
  
Sally paced for another moment, and then gave it up. Her elbow landed on the hut's window frame, her head supported in her hand. This was a day gone bad to worse. As if it weren't enough that they were going to lose Drizit, now Sally had a sneaking suspicion that she was going to lose two of her best friends, as well.  
  
***  
  
Bunnie and Rotor strode alongside Griff, who was moving almost too fast to keep pace with. His legs pumped with a ferocity that completely contradicted the usual nonchalant attitude he had donned only moments ago. His mouth was twisted down in scowl. Bunnie couldn't help but get the impression that another sleeping demon had been awakened.  
  
She couldn't tell where he was headed, except that it seemed to be one of the buildings clustered in the center of the Lower Mobius cavern. "How did you know about the nodule?" she asked again.  
  
"I knew the nature of your robotic limbs was unusual from the moment I saw you," Griff said. "I always suspected, but I could never be sure."  
  
"Of what?"  
  
"That Robotnik used the Laurentis modifications to roboticize you."  
  
Bunnie struggled to keep up. Despite the strength of her metal legs, they were slower and heavier than any organic counterpart could be. They rounded a curve in the dirt road, drawing stares from more passing pedestrians. "And how do you know about the Laurentis process?" Rotor asked.  
  
"I invented it."  
  
Bunnie felt the ground slip up underneath her, all sense of orientation suddenly lost. In her shock, she suddenly forgot where she was walking, and nearly tripped over her own feet. She stood still a moment, trying to regain her balance.  
  
Griff either didn't see her stop or didn't care. He kept walking stubbornly forward, scowl growing deeper by the second.  
  
Bunnie felt a hand gently touch her organic arm. Rotor's. His support pushed her forward. She ran to catch up with Griff.  
  
"You're Laurentis?" she asked breathlessly.  
  
"Past tense," Griff corrected. "I *was* Laurentis. That distinction is important to me."  
  
It wasn't to Bunnie. Usually she mindfully kept her emotions in check. Now she didn't care how much anger was in her voice. "Ya mean you're the one who-"  
  
"Came up with the concept of an enhanced-strength roboticization process," he finished for her. "The same process that Robotnik used on you. Yes, that was me."  
  
"You knew all along what Robotnik had done to me? Why didn't you tell anyone?"  
  
"I suspected. I never knew. If I had told you, I would've had to face who I was. Laurentis is a liar and a cowardly miscreant, somebody you'd never want to meet. He's dead as far as I'm concerned."  
  
Griff's pace had never changed or slowed. Bunnie had a hard enough time keep by herself, but Rotor had it worse. She could hear the pudgy walrus starting to pant. "He'd better not be dead if he's the one who knows how to uninstall the Laurentis nodule. If you're the one who knows, this isn't the time to suffer split-personality syndrome."  
  
Griff didn't answer.  
  
They rounded another corner, verging on the market square in the center of the Lower Mobius. The city's cavern was large, verging on the colossal, but it take less than an hour to walk across the breadth of it. Bunnie was disoriented by the way the shadows moved as they got closer to directly underneath the glowing energy crystal. She had spent her entire life on the surface, mostly without the aid of artificial lighting, so was hard to shake the impression that several hours had passed, and that it was now noontime. As if her perceptions of the entire city had been changed that much. They had, in a way, since Griff's confession.  
  
"Please, Griff," Bunnie pleaded. "Ah don't care who or what Laurentis is anymore. But we have to know if there's a way to get rid of this infernal transmitter."  
  
"It can't be uninstalled," he said quietly.  
  
Her muscles contracted and froze, feeling like ice. It was only through sheer force of will that her legs were able to keep moving. She knew that his words hadn't even sunk in yet.  
  
"What?"  
  
Griff's expression trembled for a moment, but then fell back into a scowl. "You can blame Laurentis for that. You can blame *me* for that."  
  
Before Bunnie could think of an answer, Griff came to a dead stop. The discussion was apparently closed for now. He turned and glanced towards a small group of people gathered near the market square. In a few short seconds he began moving again, heading towards them.  
  
She could see a bright blue and gold uniform, similar to the one Antoine always insisted on wearing even in the hottest of weather but more highly decorated, amidst the small gathering. Griff's faithful boar companion, Dirk, was guiding a small procession of three people through the marketplace.  
  
Dirk had always been somewhat of a mystery to Bunnie, but the integrity of his character was clear enough. He had devoted his life to service before the coup, and continued to do so even afterwards, when there was no military left to speak of. He had fought on the front lines during the Great War, but had only occasionally in the role of soldier. He had been a fully trained medic, and had even been assigned to King Acorn's diplomatic staff near the end of the war.  
  
He seemed sensible enough, but his devotion to Griff always perplexed Bunnie. The last time she had been down here, she had asked him about Griff's questionable behavior during the two groups' first encounter. Dirk had adamantly defended everything that Griff had done, almost blindly so. Bunnie found that she could only be comfortable around him for a few minutes. Too long and his unfaltering loyalty began to grate.  
  
They were close enough to hear his words now. He sounded almost like a tour-guide. "The marketplace is center of the city, the place where most everything that happens, well, happens. It's also where new citizens can help out the most. We need as many helping hands as we can get, in doing everything from moving goods and supplies to running storefronts." He held up his hands. "Lower Mobius, is, though, a refugee camp, first and foremost. If you can't help out or want to just settle in with your family first, that's perfectly all right. Down here, we provide for everyone who isn't Robotnik." Several nods or warm smiles met his words.  
  
Dirk prepared to lead the new arrivals onward when he spotted Griff. "Here's our chief, now. Griff, is there anything you'd-"  
  
"Sorry, there's no time for this right now," Griff said urgently. "Dirk, something big is happening. I want you to put all our militia posts on standby alert." He swallowed, pausing. "And ready the evacuation drills. Just in case."  
  
The three new citizens looked alarmed. A startled gasp came from one of them; Bunnie didn't see from which.  
  
"I don't mean to frighten anyone," he said quickly. "This is just a precaution."  
  
"What's going on, Griff?" Dirk asked.  
  
"Something that's my fault," he answered. "I hope that nothing happens, but just in case, I want the city to be ready."  
  
It was all the answer Dirk needed. He nodded curtly, and looked back at the group of three following him. "Sorry, folks, but city business calls. Hopefully someone showed you where you can set up your new quarters, but I've got to go."  
  
***  
  
Griff's house was almost as charmingly quaint as the mountain goat himself, but still far too spartan for Bunnie's liking. There were enough decorations scattered about to provide for a personal touch, but most of the walls were plain, unremarkable brown rock. As if the 'homey' feel of the house itself were only superficial, and there was some component of its personality missing, something essential to its personality yet something that it didn't want to make seen.  
  
Again, much like Griff himself, Bunnie reflected. She wondered what else he had kept concealed from them over the years.  
  
Slow, coiling tendrils of steam licked upwards from the cups of caffeine-laden drinks on Griff's dinner table. He had insisted on preparing them, though Bunnie couldn't fathom why. He was the only one who touched the cups, cradling it as if for comfort. Rotor's and her own merely leaked their heat away.  
  
"The past always has a way of catching up with you, huh?" Griff asked emptily, gazing at her metallic left arm. Contrary to what Bunnie would have expected, the caffeine had mollified his anxiety somewhat. He was turning back into the calm, self-assured Griff that Bunnie remembered, although not very quickly. His exterior determination had melted away, making him seem more vulnerable.  
  
"Believe me, Ah know that better than anyone else."  
  
"I was afraid that this would happen someday. I wasn't sure how, but I knew that Laurentis had left enough behind to maybe hurt someone."  
  
"Tell us more about Laurentis," Rotor suggested.  
  
Bunnie expected another objection, another vigorous statement of hatred towards his past self. His voice was calm and clear instead. Maybe the caffeine really did help calm him, or maybe it was the familiar surroundings. Bunnie didn't care which.  
  
"I suppose you both deserve to know," Griff sighed, resigned, "Simply put, Laurentis wasn't the kind of person you'd like to meet. I wasn't concerned about anyone or anything other than myself. I never paid attention to anything that didn't directly affect me or my work. I didn't *care* enough about other people to realize that I always found some way to hurt those who did manage to come close to me.  
  
"Even worse, I realized what the roboticizer could be used for. While Sir Charles was conducting medical experiments, I was fantasizing about armies of robots. I had these harmless little dreams about abusing the roboticizer, and doing exactly what Robotnik's doing up on the surface right now.  
  
"That's why I proposed the Laurentis process. I wasn't trying to improve strength or stamina in hospital patients. It was just a little exercise in my fantasies. I," Griff stuttered for a moment, "*Laurentis* was trying to find a way to create an armada of robotic supermen. Use the machine to magnify a person's strength until it was twenty times what they would normally be capable of.  
  
"That's really why I added the beacon to the system's layout. The damn roboticizer didn't need the beacon to function. I thought that any armada of supermen would need a tracking device so that their commanding officer, me, could always be able to find them. Even when they were sealed in the city's sewers. God, it was just a fantasy, though, that was all.  
  
"I didn't try to be a bad person. Truly, I didn't. Right up until the end, I thought I was one of the good guys. Fantasies aside, I always imagined myself as a fearless medical researcher, pushing back social and ethical boundaries in a tireless quest to save lives. When the end finally came, I saw what my fantasies had finally accomplished. An entire civilization enslaved by a tyrannical madman. Both Sir Charles and I saw what our work had done to life on Mobius.  
  
"I can't even imagine what torture Charles went through when he was cast into his own invention and roboticized. I just know that there was one thing that truly defined Laurentis's character, the motivation that lurked underneath the surface of his personality, and that it finally came out into the open on the day of the coup.  
  
"When I looked out over the vast armada of newly roboticized worker bots, I found that deep inside, I was actually *proud* of what had been done."  
  
Griff's eyes were far away. He refused to even glance at either of his two guests. Bunnie suspected that this was the first time he had told this story to anyone.  
  
"That was the day that Laurentis died. I cursed my luck that I was one of the few lucky enough to escape Mobotropolis, and fled underground. The only thing that I couldn't hide from there was myself, but that was the only thing I wanted to.  
  
"If I hadn't met another band of five or so refugees, I probably wouldn't have survived long. I hadn't been pushed far enough to be suicidal, but I wouldn't have worked too hard at staying alive. The will to keep living just wasn't there, all that was left was a fear of death.  
  
"The moment I knew that I was no longer Laurentis was when I met those refugees, and began traveling with them. When they asked me my name, I immediately responded 'Griff', the name of one of my favorite professors back at the Uni. The man had practically been my hero, even after I had graduated, and he had been one of the first to be roboticized.  
  
"I tried to assume his personality for a while, be just like him, but that didn't work out for long. Again, my will to live started to slip. It was when we found the old, abandoned buildings down in this cavern that I finally found a new purpose in life. I tried to make up for my old crimes, watching this turn from a refugee camp of five, to thirty, to over one hundred. But even now I've come nowhere close to making up from what I - Laurentis - did back on the surface.  
  
"And Laurentis is still alive inside me, which only makes it worse. If I'm not vigilant, the old facets of my personality start to surface again, and hurt people. You saw Laurentis when I stole the power rock from your village grotto. I just wanted to save my city, but I had no regard for how much you Freedom Fighters needed it. That's Laurentis in his full glory.  
  
"It was bad enough knowing that my work on the roboticizer had been put to such a fiendish purpose. But now I know that my own little fantasy of robotic supermen - the Laurentis process - has actually been used to hurt someone. It'll never end. Just when I start thinking that I've done a little good in the world, it turns out that I've just made it that much more rotten."  
  
"But if your intentions were good-" Bunnie started.  
  
"No! They weren't good. The fantasy was always my intention, conscious or no. I never thought that someone might use the groundwork I laid to finish the job."  
  
"It doesn't matter now," Rotor said. "Not if you can tell us how to safely uninstall the Laurentis nodule itself. Or even just deactivate the transmitter. That's what's important right now."  
  
"It can't be done."  
  
Steam from the drinks drifted sluggishly through the empty room.  
  
"What?" Rotor asked, slowly.  
  
"Neither the Laurentis nodule or the beacon can be deactivated," Griff said, setting down his own empty cup on the table. The impact of rock and ceramic was a hollow sound; hollow as Bunnie's stomach felt. Fear, anger, disbelief, she had lost the ability to tell the difference between them. Her emotions felt cold, rolled up in the center of her stomach like a ball of ice. "It's because of the way I incorporated the nodule into your systems."  
  
Rotor pressed onward. "Forget uninstalling it, then, but what about destroying it?"  
  
"No, trying either one will have the same effect. The nodule acts not only a focusing lens for the roboticizer beam, but as a nervous system for all of Bunnie's bionic components. It channels power to all three of her limbs." Griff paused, gazing hesitantly down at the table. "If the nodule is tampered with or removed incorrectly, the powered components of her limbs will overload. The shock will be enough to shut down all electrical activity in her brain."  
  
"Ah'll be dead," Bunnie said helplessly. Whether her horror had yet to wear off, or fully sink in, she couldn't say.  
  
"You said 'removed incorrectly'," Rotor said. "What happens if the nodule is removed properly?"  
  
"We can't do that from here," Griff said. "There are some failsafes installed in the nodule, but we can't take advantage of them. Not without the proper tools."  
  
"Explain."  
  
"There is a tool out there that sends a warning signal to the Laurentis nodule, lets it know that a power shut-off might be coming. With the warning, the nodule prepares itself, stops channeling power to the other bionic components. Then it can be removed or configured without killing the person.  
  
"But the tool needed is a very specialized component, one built precisely for the purpose of interacting with the nodule. We don't have any here. The only place that would have this tool, that I can think of, is Robotropolis itself."  
  
"Go on," Rotor prodded.  
  
"Maybe you've seen it, Bunnie. It's a blade, with a sharp tip fitted for adjustment screws on the nodule itself. When the warning beacon is activated, the blade itself looks like it glows a shade of blue."  
  
An ancient flash of memory overwhelmed Bunnie. For a moment, she was fourteen again, back in the roboticizer chamber. Robotnik towered over her, a glowing knife clenched in his fat palm. She saw him open her leg, fiddle with something, and shut it again. She felt the murderous pain stabbing up her spine.  
  
Rotor was still speaking. "So if we can get this tool..."  
  
"No. Not even then. Like I said earlier, the nodule plays a critical role in channeling power to her augmented limbs. Even if you were to break into Robotropolis, steal the blade, and surgically remove the nodule. Bunnie would be paralyzed for the rest of her life. Her mechanical arm and legs wouldn't have any power to move, nor would they ever."  
  
Permanently frozen. Crippled. As good as dead. And that was the best case scenario. Rotor had been wrong. There wasn't going to be any way out of this one.  
  
No matter how long or hard they fought, her life as a Freedom Fighter was over.  
  
Bunnie didn't hear the rest of their words. She stood up, as calmly as she could manage, and stormed out of the room.  
  
***  
  
She heard the door to Griff's house open behind her, so roughly that it slammed into the wall adjacent to the hinges. Rotor's heavy, plodding footsteps struggled to catch up with her.  
  
"Bunnie, wait!"  
  
It was sorely tempting to turn around, wait for him, see if he could ease the burdens that rested all too heavily on her shoulders. Rotor had been one of her best friends since she lost her family in the coup, and she felt terrible for just turning her back on him. But the relentless time bomb ticking in her leg would only hurt him, too.  
  
Now that it was all over for her, the only thing left to do was make sure that her friends didn't get caught in Robotnik's sights.  
  
She picked up her pace, and didn't look back. She didn't even know where she was heading. Just the fact that it was away was all the mattered. Eventually, she discovered that her feet were taking her towards the street where the parked cargo sled was waiting.  
  
It wasn't long before the clacking of Griff's hooves joined Rotor's footsteps. No matter how fast she walked, they kept getting closer, and she couldn't bring herself to break into a full run. She felt Griff's hand catch her shoulder, trying to stop her.  
  
Bunnie batted it off with a ferocity that surprised her, and kept walking. It was Rotor's voice that finally stopped her; not because of what he said, but what he didn't.  
  
"*Please*."  
  
The tone struck every chord of desperation, and of helpless frustration. At last she realized that, no matter how dire the situation, she couldn't bear to leave her friends so miserable. She owed them at least this much.  
  
She turned around to face them, not caring whether or not they saw how bloodshot her eyes were. "Weren't you listening? It's all done, there's nothing Ah can do about it. Ah have to leave!"  
  
"Maybe... maybe you could stay down here for a while," Rotor suggested, struggling, "Even if the worst does happen, the signal strength probably isn't strong enough to break through the hundreds of meters of rock and soil between us and the surface. Robotnik will never know."  
  
Bunnie directed an accusing stare at Griff. She already knew what he had to say.  
  
"I'm sorry, Rotor," he said sadly, "but I designed the beacon specifically with underground work in mind. The actual transmitted particles are small enough to fly through molecular gaps in any compound. Two hundred kilometers of rock wouldn't stop it."  
  
Bunnie was about to turn around, start walking towards the cargo sled. Again, the pain in Rotor's voice kept her there, a bond as solid as prison chains. "We have to try something, damn it," he said, more out of general protest than any specific plan. "We can't just- just leave her."  
  
"You're gonna have to," she replied, fighting to keep her answer simple lest her raging emotions choke it back down.  
  
He used the same entreaty that he had at the start of the journey. "Take me with you. Please. Even if we have go as far as to invade Robotropolis and steal Laurentis's blade, I'll come with." Empathy and compassion were bursting out of the normally repressed mechanic's voice like an internal dam had been demolished. Like he was standing at the precipice of the end of time, with one last chance to say something he'd kept bottled up all his life. "I'll face down Robotnik himself if it means keeping you alive."  
  
"Rotor, the only thing that would accomplish is getting yourself killed!" She kept hearing herself talk, and hating the words. She could understand where Rotor was coming from. There was something bubbling up inside her, some emotion she'd never noticed but would be empty without, some nameless feeling. She couldn't even place it, or give it a voice, but it was so strong. And it got stronger whenever she saw Rotor.  
  
"I'm coming, too," Griff announced. "This is my fault more than anybody else's. If someone's going to get killed over this, I just hope it's me. But I have to help."  
  
Bunnie backed away from them. Their motives were pure, almost more than that, but they didn't understand the reality of the situation. "Y'all just don't get it, do ya? I'm dead no matter what. Y'all just wanna help, but you're only going to get yourselves caught in the crossfire."  
  
"Bunnie-" Rotor started. She couldn't let him finish.  
  
"No, please, if y'all wanna help me... just go. Forget you ever knew about me. The only thing that would make this nightmare worse is knowing that my friends are going to die with me," she pleaded. "And that's exactly what's going to happen if you follow me!"  
  
"But-"  
  
"No! Just go!" Tears streamed openly down her face. "Ah have to die alone. Ah can't let any of you come with!"  
  
Every time the nightmare had haunted her, one aspect had always been the same. Just as Robotnik was throwing her into the dreaded roboticizer, to finish the job he'd started, she'd see the faces of her friends outside the cold glass tube. They'd followed her, tried to save her, only to be betrayed and murdered by the Laurentis nodule's transmitter. If she could prevent that now, she'd still be dead, but at least the worst aspect of the nightmare would never come true. Her friends wouldn't die because of her.  
  
No matter how much they wanted to.  
  
"Please understand," she tried one last time. Her legs began carrying her backwards, back on the route towards the cargo sled. This time, Rotor and Griff didn't try to follow her. They just stood there, the pain on both their faces readily apparent. Seeing it on Rotor's face hurt worse than anything else. "The only thing that would make this worse right now is if y'all died because of me. The only thing-" a startled cry escaped her mouth without warning, cutting her off in the middle of the sentence. Shocked by a physical pain she hadn't expected, she tripped over her right leg and fell to the ground.  
  
She knew from the instant she first felt the sensation, peculiar yet familiar all at once, that it was going to get worse.  
  
She had tripped because something in the thigh of her metallic right leg had twitched. Some internal component had stuttered, momentarily disrupting the motion of the servos and motors in there.  
  
Something had switched on.  
  
Within seconds, both Rotor and Griff were at her side, helping her into a sitting position. Their voices seemed hollow and distant, so very far away. "Bunnie? What happened?" Rotor asked, voice thick with concern. "Are you all right?"  
  
Bunnie held up a hand to silence him. She could feel the blood rushing from her face, fear taking an iron grip on her stomach. Time itself seemed to slow down as she placed her ear against the metal surface of her right leg.  
  
She could hear a faint mechanical whir from inside, a high-pitched tone. Coming from the position of the Laurentis nodule.  
  
Her nightmare had at last come true.  
  
"Ah was too late. It's happenin'. Isn't it?" 


	5. Secret's Out

Hours of lethargic inactivity gave way within an instant. The arrays of display readouts and monitors, dismally dark just seconds before, lit up like wildfire spreading throughout the throne room. Snively snapped to a straighter posture, instantly alert. The sensors had been programmed to alert him for one and only one thing.  
  
"Yes! Bingo!" Headphones flew off his head, the alarms still ringing in his ears. His excited voice was raised to a fever pitch. It wasn't often that he was able to give his Uncle good news of such high caliber. "Sir! We found her!"  
  
Motors whirred underneath the green metal throne as it turned, revealing Robotnik's face. He looked at the consoles in front of Snively with wide, surprised eyes, as if he hadn't expected this to actually happen. Within seconds, the surprise turned to glee. It wasn't merely simple happiness, though, no, Robotnik's joy was laced with a malice that made Snively shiver.  
  
More readouts flashing, each competing for attention. Snively could only spare a glance at each, but he gathered more than enough information. "Laurentis's activation code was six-nine-seven-tango-four-three, after decryption. It took us a while, but we did it, sir!"  
  
"Oh, *yes*! I've waited far too long for this!" Square-shaped teeth glinted in the throne room's light. "Give me the details."  
  
"Just under twenty seconds ago we began receiving a wide-beam beacon- style ping, on radio frequency forty-four point seven kilohertz. That's the band the Laurentis nodule is configured for. Our receiving station here in Robotropolis has already got a distance fix. The signal's weaker than we anticipated, but our readouts peg her somewhere within a distance of forty-three kilometers of the city itself."  
  
"So much the better. What about the rabbit's exact position?"  
  
Snively's fingertips flew to the keyboard, frantically typing in orders. His words were relayed to remote outposts scattered across the Great Forest, and to the obedient worker bots staffing them. "We don't know yet. I've already got our other receiving posts looking for the signal. Once they have it, we can begin running a triangulation routine. We'll know where she is in a few seconds."  
  
Robotnik rose from his chair, clasping his hands together in eager anticipation. "If she's in Knothole... it will be the end of the Freedom Fighters, Snively."  
  
"And if she's not, sir?"  
  
Contrary to what Snively had expected, Robotnik's grin grew wider. "Then I get to focus all of my attention on the rabbit."  
  
***  
  
Griff held a trained ear to the surface plate on Bunnie's right leg, the metal access piece that covered the Laurentis nodule itself.  
  
His face told Bunnie everything she wanted to know.  
  
"Oh, no..."  
  
"What?" Rotor asked frantically. He wasn't used to not knowing what was going on. "What is it? What's happening?"  
  
"Bunnie was right," was all that Griff could manage to say. "Robotnik's activated the Laurentis nodule."  
  
The time bomb had finally gone off. After two long years of waiting, the transmitter had finally ticked for the last time. Now it was screaming her location across the world, to the tyrant sitting on a metal throne atop an enslaved city. He was going to add her to the list of the vanquished, the crushed, and there was nothing she could do about it.  
  
All her life she'd been hiding from him. The Freedom Fighters had never been able to challenge Robotnik's brute force, so they had settled for striking from the shadows. As long as Robotnik's searchlight never spotted them they could escape. For Bunnie, there could be no more hiding. All of Robotnik's anger was directed at her head. Even worse, just by being here she had given away Lower Mobius's location.  
  
Everything smashed in a horrible instant.  
  
"Now?" Rotor looked at the placid city surrounding them, eyes wide with last-ditch denial. "He couldn't have!"  
  
The nodule continued to whir underneath the surface of Bunnie's right leg.  
  
She had been ready to leave, to just get out of here. Save these people. It wasn't fair that it had happened now. Nightmares were never fair.  
  
One hundred and fifty people.  
  
Her senses whirled around her like a roller coaster, lost amidst the realization of the magnitude of her crime. There were one hundred and fifty people living in Lower Mobius. A city that Robotnik now had the exact location of, thanks to her. Sight and sound became dizzying. Words were spoken but they faded from her memory quickly.  
  
"Griff!" Dirk's voice. He was running towards them, radio clenched tightly in his fist. Bunnie tried to pay attention, but kept losing herself again.  
  
"Dirk," Griff began, "we have to-"  
  
"There's no time," the boar said. It was the first time Bunnie had seen him panicking. "I've been getting calls from every militia station and watch post. Someone's broadcasting a signal from within the city. There's a spy here trying to give us away to Robotnik!"  
  
"I know," came Griff's reply.  
  
"You know? What?"  
  
"It's my fault, Dirk." Griff's usual shield, his charm, was completely gone. The admission was frank, honest.  
  
"Then we have to shut it down now, before Robotnik uses it to trace us!"  
  
"We can't shut it down. Not without murdering her."  
  
Dirk's eyes fell upon Bunnie, who was still sitting dazed on the ground. Understanding flashed in his eyes. Anger.  
  
"She's been broadcasting the signal, hasn't she," Dirk said. "She's the traitor."  
  
"She's no traitor!" Griff shot back, the ferocity in his voice taking his friend aback.  
  
"But then how-"  
  
"I'm the guilty party here, Dirk. We've lost everything because of my mistake. Now sound the evacuation sirens throughout the city. We have to save what we can."  
  
Dirk looked unsure of what to do for a moment. He kept glancing from Griff to Bunnie, back and forth. The anger wasn't completely gone, but it was overshadowed by uncertainty. Follow his friend's orders or his anger.  
  
"Go!"  
  
Loyalty won out. With a last, fleeting look at Griff, Dirk ran back in the direction he came, disappearing around street corners. The last Bunnie heard of him was orders shouted into the radio. He had the voice of a man who'd had everything torn away from him by a horrible flash of unreality.  
  
"Mah fault..."  
  
Within moments, loud sirens began howling throughout the bustling streets and buildings of Lower Mobius. A city wailing because of her, Bunnie thought.  
  
***  
  
Circles began to appear on Snively's monitor, slowly but surely resizing themselves until they all began to collide at a single at a single point. Snively watched it anxiously, feeling his Uncle's impatient stare over his shoulder. The point where the boundaries of the three circles met would be where the rabbit was.  
  
Snively kept zooming in on his map view as the ranges narrowed. When they finally stopped, though, the edges of the circles actually overlapped each other.  
  
He frowned. That wasn't supposed to happen.  
  
The joy in Robotnik's voice was gone, replaced by testiness. "Where is the rabbit?"  
  
"I really don't know. The triangulation routine seems to be malfunctioning."  
  
He ordered the monitoring outposts to try and reestablish a distance trace on the beacon. The circles obstinately continued to overlap each other. Had the triangulation been working correctly, they should have been touching only at a single point. There was over half a square kilometer of ground within the overlap now. That wasn't right at all.  
  
"What is going wrong, Snively?"  
  
Snively knew that tone well enough. He was looking for somebody to blame. Snively kept his cool, though. Panicking would only make Robotnik angrier.  
  
"I think I know, sir. Hold on." Snively quickly opened up the cartography program's interface, typing in commands to re-render the map in three dimensions. The display in front of him tilted; mountains and hills suddenly had depth. He could see the rolling elevation of the Great Forest. Another command told the program to add the triangulation circles again, but this time render them as three-dimensional objects, spheres.  
  
The spheres obediently materialized on the new map, precisely in the pattern Snively had imagined they would. This time, all three met at exactly two points, one far above ground the other far below.  
  
Snively immediately discounted the idea that the rabbit was soaring through the air. If she were in a hover car that high off the ground, radar in Robotropolis would have detected her long ago. That left the point below the surface.  
  
"We've got her, sir. She's about two hundred and fifty meters underground." One of the few things Snively liked about his job was the flexibility of the computer system. It only took a few key taps to pull data from subterranean map files and incorporate them into his current file. "She's in a system of large caverns that have been abandoned since long before the Great War."  
  
"You mean Knothole is underground?" Robotnik asked, his curiosity piqued.  
  
"Erm, no, sir. The last time I was there it was a village on the surface," he said hesitantly. Neither he nor Robotnik liked being reminded of the memory scrambler incident, but the intelligence Snively had managed to gather there was important enough.  
  
"I see. Another hide-away, then?"  
  
"It seems likely," Snively agreed. "Especially now that we know the various groups of Freedom Fighters have begun to work together."  
  
"Then this will be too much fun," the fat man said, stomach quivering. "Oh, yes, I'm going to enjoy this. Payback's a bitch, rabbit. Snively?"  
  
"Yes, sir?"  
  
"Ready my strike force."  
  
***  
  
The city screamed around them. The passerby and citizens that they saw immediately flinched at the noise, then began moving either through buildings or city streets, rushing towards the center of the city. There was no panic, no angry cries of sorrow, just cool and calm movement, a sharp contrast to the blaring sirens. Lower Mobius had gone through similar drills before, Bunnie realized. The people just didn't know how permanent it would be this time. When the thought finally occurred them, she knew that there would be mass fright and panic.  
  
All because of her.  
  
This wasn't like any of the storybooks she had ever read as a kid. She remembered reading each one, mesmerized by the hero or heroine's courage. No matter how bad things got, there was always a shining flicker of hope clearly visible in any situation, no matter what. The little spark of life that kept the protagonist moving, fighting the odds.  
  
With the transmitter in her leg, there was no hope. She was being buried in piles of futility, so deep that she couldn't even breathe. Even if she killed herself now, Robotnik would still come and destroy Lower Mobius. He would win.  
  
Scratch that. He *had* won.  
  
A voice in Bunnie's mind scolded her for thinking that. For thinking that the future was as static and unchangeable as the past. It wasn't. Though there may only be a few grains of sand left in her hourglass, the least she could do was try to accomplish something with them.  
  
She picked herself off the ground, brushing the road's dust from off her legs. The worst had finally come to pass, but Bunnie saw that she had come out on the other side. There wasn't anything she could do about the transmitter now, but in the time left to her, maybe she could help someone.  
  
"What's the city's evacuation procedure?" she asked Griff urgently.  
  
"It depends on where in the city you are. Most of everybody moves towards the center of the city, where we've got a pool of hover cars ready to start shuttling people back and forth between here and our rendezvous points on the surface. Those who can't make it there know how to escape through side tunnels in the cavern." Griff glanced worriedly at the energy crystal still glowing passively over the doomed city. "We've- I've got to go and help."  
  
"Ah'm comin' with," Bunnie said, resolution surprising herself. This was all her fault, and the thought of not helping never even occurred to her.  
  
"Me, too," Rotor said.  
  
Do what you can with the grains left in the hourglass. Accept that you couldn't do anything else. Bunnie kept telling herself this over and over as they jogged down the city streets to join the flow of departing traffic, but it didn't make herself feel any better. Every time she saw another face she saw another life destroyed because of her.  
  
But what else could she do?  
  
They shortcut off the main street, separating themselves from the flow of traffic. Griff waved them into a smaller, unmarked building just off the main road. He tried to explain where they were going, but his voice was lost in the continuing roar of the sirens.  
  
When they finally stepped inside, Bunnie saw where Griff had led them. Computers, old and dingy machines scrounged from Robotropolis's scrapyards, abounded in the one-room building. They looked ancient and beat-up, but were still usable. Numerous display readouts continually blinked red- flagged charts, graphs, and pictures. The sound of the screaming evacuation sirens were muffled by the walls, but there was no less an atmosphere of alarm in here.  
  
Besides herself, Griff, and Rotor, Bunnie counted maybe four others moving through the room, clacking buttons on keyboards or staring in slack-jawed shock at monitors. Dirk was standing at the front of the room, glaring out a window that overlooked the center of Lower Mobius, occasionally speaking into his radio unit. Voices buzzed back to him.  
  
"This is where all our emergency operations are coordinated," Griff said softly, aware that his voice hadn't been audible before.  
  
Dirk glanced up sharply upon their entrance, glaring at Bunnie. But he remembered Griff's earlier command, and said nothing to her.  
  
"I want a full report," Griff said.  
  
"The evacuation's proceeding smoothly for now, thanks to all the drills we've run over the years," the boar snapped to attention, all external signs of hostility towards Bunnie gone, as if somebody had flicked a light switch. "The problem is, most everybody out there thinks that this is just another practice run. They don't know about any beacon. When that happens, you can bet that there's going to be panic."  
  
"How much of that can we cope with?"  
  
"Not much at all. Most of the evac transports are already clustered at the market square. We're completely dependent on citizens getting there themselves. We can't help anybody who doesn't show up." A camera feed of the square caught Bunnie's eye. There was already a crowd there. Many stalls and groceries were scattered across the ground, roadside shops destroyed to make enough room for the hover cars. Someone's life work destroyed. "Griff... it doesn't matter how soon Robotnik shows up. We're bound to leave some people behind in all this confusion. People are going to die because of this."  
  
Bunnie thought she had hit rock bottom earlier, but somehow she found herself continuing to slide downward. The last sentence kept echoing in her ears.  
  
"How long will it be before the majority of the populace can be evacuation from the cavern?" Griff asked.  
  
"Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes to get most everybody. That's a pretty conservative estimate, though. More if other things go wrong."  
  
"And, assuming that Robotnik leaves Robotropolis now, how long do we have before he gets here?"  
  
"No more than twenty-five minutes."  
  
"That's cutting it awfully close."  
  
"Maybe we could delay the strike force for a few minutes. I've already scrambled all the militia ranks in the barracks, the outposts are on full alert. Armed only with laser rifles, they wouldn't stand much of a chance, but they'll be between the Robotnik and the civilians."  
  
"No!" Bunnie nearly shouted. "Nobody's goin' to suicide because of me!"  
  
Dirk glared at her again, the old anger flickering briefly in his eyes. He looked expectantly at Griff.  
  
The mountain goat shook his head. "Order whatever militia's still in the city to evacuate with the civilians. Tell those at the guard outposts to abandon those positions, get to our rendezvous point on the surface as fast as they can. If they see any of Robotnik's forces along the tunnels, tell them to get out of the way and not fire back."  
  
Dirk seemed disappointed, but he gave no other sign that he disagreed with his commander. "Of course, sir."  
  
"We're going to save as many lives as we can."  
  
"Yes, sir." For a moment, the boar's military discipline faltered, wavering on the edge of uncertainty.  
  
"Griff? Is this really happening? Are we really going to lose the city?"  
  
"Yes. Laurentis finally killed it."  
  
"Who?"  
  
"I'll tell you if we survive this disaster. Just... get to work."  
  
Dirk nodded, then trotted back to his post by the window, giving orders into his hand radio even as he moved.  
  
"So now what?" Rotor asked in the silence that followed.  
  
"Ah'm goin' out there," Bunnie said. "Ah have to help those people out there. There's so many of them."  
  
"Bunnie..."  
  
"Don't even try, Rotor. Ah have to." She backed towards the door. "Ah'll come back here after Ah've done what Ah can. Just don't try to stop me this time."  
  
She could clearly tell that it pained him not to, but this time he at least listened to her. "Good luck, Bunnie. Hurry back after you've done what you can."  
  
She ran out outside the building, determination to help overwhelming the depression of futility. Rotor's last words echoed in her ears, hollow and empty. "We will beat this."  
  
***  
  
Market square was breaking down into pandemonium. When people arrived and saw the hover cars clustered around the center of the village, it finally became apparent that this was for real. The shock that the city that had existed almost as long as Robotropolis was in danger of utter annihilation struck the crowd with the force of a jackhammer.  
  
Ignoring the cries of panic and distress, Bunnie fought the crowd to force herself away from the marketplace. Those people were already at the evac point. It was the people who weren't who needed help.  
  
A child's plaintive wail cut through the chaos. It was the first time she had ever heard or seen a child in Lower Mobius, but she supposed it was possible. There were entire families down here.  
  
But there wouldn't be for long.  
  
She fought back against more than just the crowd as she squeezed forward. The density of people slackened, slowing to just a trickle. Most of the city was already clustered around the market square. Those who weren't, couldn't. The ones who needed help.  
  
Bunnie searched the dirt roads, buildings, offering a hand wherever she could, but never being able to help much. A family looking for a lost child. She told them to just go down to the market: he was likely there waiting for him. An artist scrambling to pack away his meager but precious belongings. She couldn't help much there, either, only load a few items and send him on his way. Otherwise everyone she saw was already leaving, giving her nothing to do.  
  
Everywhere she looked she saw misery. What would they do if they found out that she was the cause, Bunnie wondered. She considered telling them, thinking that even a lynching at the hands of rightfully angry villagers would be better than the fate otherwise in store for her, but decided at last against it. It would only add to their suffering, take away the valuable time that they needed to evacuate.  
  
The heavy bass thunder of multiple thruster blasts rumbled throughout the city cavern. Bunnie looked towards the market, squinting against the glare of the energy crystal. The first convoy of hover cars had left, each one packed to the brink. Bunnie counted over two-dozen distant pinpricks coasting away from the market, picking up speed. Within minutes, each would return ready to take more.  
  
Heads turned sharply at the noise, a few shouts of alarm echoed over rooftops. It was finally becoming apparent to everyone that this was not a drill. Bunnie gritted her teeth and plodded onward.  
  
Ordinarily, Bunnie was never very confident about her skills in number- crunching and algebra, but the equations rushing through her head now were coldly accurate. At the most there would only be time for one more such trip before Robotnik arrived. Everybody in the city *had* to be ready to leave by then.  
  
There were fewer and fewer people out in the streets, and all of the ones Bunnie saw were already headed towards the evacuation point. There was no one in need of any help, nothing she could do.  
  
She knew that the problem lay in the odds against finding anyone. If there was someone out there disabled, trapped, or otherwise unable to move to the evac point, Bunnie was unlikely to ever find them. She was only one person, and Lower Mobius was a large city.  
  
She kept searching and searching, and time was running by all the while. Minutes had past since the first convoy of hover cars had left. She could already hear the engine rumble of the first few to return. Eventually, there wasn't even anyone left in the streets. Anybody who could move was already down at market square, and even some of those who couldn't. Bunnie was alone.  
  
Lower Mobius had become a ghost town. Bunnie kept telling herself that there were still people out here, people who were going to die because of her. Unless she found them.  
  
Still the sirens continued blaring, shrieking at her with high notes of accusation. The sound grated against her ears.  
  
Two years of waiting had come down to this climatic moment. As she walked, Bunnie could only wonder who else would get caught in the maelstrom.  
  
***  
  
"I'm not following you, Nicole," Sally said. She resisted the urge to shake out the hand-held computer in frustration. She had had all her life to become accustomed to her best friend's technobabble, so it wasn't often that she made this little sense.  
  
Nicole tried again. "AT 1323 HOURS, I BEGAN PICKING UP A BEACON- STYLE TRANSMISSION ALONG RADIO BAND FORTY-FOUR POINT THREE KILOHERTZ."  
  
Sonic was even more clueless than Sally. He scratched his head earnestly. "And you said that this whatcamicallit has something to do with Bunnie and Rotor."  
  
"THAT IS CORRECT, MY MAIN HEDGEHOG. SIGNAL FREQUENCY MATCHES THAT OF THE LAURENTIS NODULE."  
  
"The Lauren-what-now? Nicole! Start making sense!"  
  
"THE LAURENTIS NODULE CONTAINS A BEACON TRANSMITTER WHOSE PROFILE MATCHES THAT OF THE SIGNAL I AM RECIEVING," Nicole said impassively. "THE NODULE IS LOCATED WITHIN BUNNIE RABBOT'S RIGHT LEG."  
  
"There's a beacon in Bunnie's leg?" Sally asked, shocked.  
  
"YES."  
  
"But that's not part of the design specifications for a normal worker bot," she said.  
  
"YES."  
  
"Never mind," Sally gave up. "But you're sure that this signal is coming from Bunnie?"  
  
"I AM SURE THAT THE SIGNAL IS COMING FROM A LAURENTIS NODULE TRANSMITTER," Nicole corrected calmly. "BUNNIE RABBOT IS THE ONLY KNOWN SPECIMEN FITTED WITH SUCH A DEVICE. IT IS A POSTULATION, NOTHING MORE."  
  
"Uh huh," Sonic said. "So where is this signal coming from?"  
  
"I HAVE BEGUN PIECING TOGETHER A TRIANGULATION ROUTINE BASED ON DATA I RECIEVED WHILE I WAS BEING CARRIED AROUND THE VILLAGE," Nicole said. "THE SIGNAL'S SOURCE APPEARS TO BE LOWER MOBIUS."  
  
"Lower Mobius? Wait a second - Nicole, could Robotnik be picking up the beacon, too?"  
  
"HE COULD NOT AVOID NOTICING IT."  
  
"Oh no!"  
  
"What is it, Sal?" Sonic was having trouble making any sense of the conversation. His eyes were opened wide with confusion and alarm. He knew that something big was happening, but not what.  
  
"Lower Mobius has been compromised!"  
  
"You mean 'Buttnik knows where to find Griff?"  
  
Sally nodded sadly. "And everyone else down there."  
  
"Oh, man, bad news! We've gotta juice over there and help! Now!"  
  
"I don't think we can, Sonic. You know how many hover units Robotnik brings these kind of operations. We can't fight that kind of brute force."  
  
Sonic clenched a fist. "Watch me."  
  
"Sonic!"  
  
"But what else can we do, Sal? Stay here and watch?"  
  
"No, but... I don't know. Do you have any ideas? Any plan that's not straight-out suicidal?"  
  
Sonic opened his mouth to snap off a retort, then thought better of it. He realized she was right. He cracked his knuckles in irritation. "Man, caught between a Robuttnik and a hard place. I hate this."  
  
"Any ideas, Nicole?"  
  
"TRYING TO FIGHT AIR POWER FROM THE GROUND IS FUTILE," the computer responded. "THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS LACK THE RESOURCES FOR A SIGNIFICANT GROUND-TO-AIR DEFENSE OF LOWER MOBIUS. MEETING AIR POWER WITH AIR POWER, THOUGH, MAY GIVE YOU A FIGHTING CHANCE."  
  
"Sonic, I want you to go run out and get Dulcy."  
  
"Dulcy?" He snapped his fingers. "Of course, air power! We're gonna find out what's happening, Sally. I promise."  
  
A burst of wind marked his exit.  
  
Sally looked quizzically at Nicole for a moment. "And you, what exactly is a 'Laurentis nodule'?"  
  
Nicole told her. 


	6. Helping Hand

It was a leader's role to stay calm in the face of disaster, make sure he stayed in control of the situation. Griff knew that whatever aura of self- control he managed to maintain was nothing more than an illusion, and that it was failing badly. Several times he had to stop himself from speaking because his voice was cracking. Only the weight of the responsibility on his shoulders kept him from breaking down completely.  
  
So many people were counting on him. They shouldn't be, and if only they had known who Laurentis was, they wouldn't be. But that didn't change the fact that they were. Already he had cleared the emergency response center of its meager staff, ordering them to get to the transports with the rest of the city. Only he, Rotor, and Dirk remained.  
  
Rotor had quickly volunteered to take the position of one of the deserting staff members. The mechanic's fingers played across the control panels of the monitoring systems, cameras and radars both, as if such unfamiliar things were second nature to him. Griff had known before that the walrus was a fair technician, but his competence with the unfamiliar tools surprised him to no end.  
  
Things had more or less settled into a shaky routine: Rotor was monitoring the surface for any signs of the armada sure to be bearing down on them, and Dirk was busy relaying orders to both transport pilots and the scattered militia. Griff didn't envy either of their jobs, but knew that his was by far harder. He was the one who had to make the decisions, and he was considering the hardest one of all.  
  
"Any sign of the task force?" Griff asked, after taking a deep breath, trying to steady his thoughts. His voice sounded disappointingly shaky.  
  
Rotor didn't look up from the monitors. Griff caught a glimpse of the Great Forest on one of the surface cameras under Rotor's observation. There was nothing in the air, but the gray smog clouds over Robotropolis churned forebodingly in the distance. "Not yet," he said, switching camera views yet again. "But most of your surveillance systems are clustered around entrance and exit surface tunnels. Once we see them, we'll only have about five minutes of warning before they reach us."  
  
Griff noticed that Rotor kept glancing at another set one monitors every few seconds, these ones set up to receive feed from cameras inside the city cavern. Looking for Bunnie, he realized.  
  
Still, the decision weighed on his mind. Griff wanted to take his mind off of it, do anything but consider it, but it still had to be made.  
  
"Dirk," he said, "how long until the second convoy is ready to leave?"  
  
The boar set down the hand-held radio for a moment, pausing to work something out in his head. "Ten minutes, give or take two. Most of the hover vehicles are still busy dropping off their first passengers."  
  
"Will everyone fit in the final convoy?"  
  
"I'd say so. We were able to take about two-thirds of everyone at the market with the first trip." Griff found himself wondering how the boar could keep his voice so calm, stay so cool under duress. He envied Dirk's military discipline. "More people have arrived since then, but we should still be able to fit everyone."  
  
"Out of the entire convoy, what vehicle has the least passenger capacity?"  
  
Dirk seemed to understand that was shorthand for 'What vehicles can the city spare?' "That would be the Sewer Crawler car, passenger capacity is six at most. We have a total of five cars of the same model line in the convoy. Most of the civilians are catching rides onboard the bigger cargo haulers."  
  
Griff's own hover sled was of the same make as the Sewer Crawler. It was the car he had taken to Knothole when he first met them. Yellow paint job; sleek, but small. "Pull two of them from the convoy, and have them sent here."  
  
"Two?" Dirk asked. "One would be more than enough to take us all."  
  
"I know, but send two anyway." Griff paused, wondering if this was the right thing to do. Over the years he had become convinced that Lower Mobius had weathered so many hardships that it had achieved its own sort of immortality. The prospect of destroying the city, even to save its population, was too much to bear. But his judgment told him that this was the best, the only, choice to make. "As soon as they get here, I want you to fly one up to the crystal generator's control room."  
  
"Why?" Dirk was genuinely confused, and worried.  
  
"I've run the analysis programs over and over again. The evacuation convoy's going to be too large, there'll be too much exhaust in the air to stay hidden. Hiding the path of one of two hover sleds usually isn't a problem, but an entire convoy. Robotnik's going to be able to track them, Dirk. He'll be able to track the convoy's exhaust trails unless we find a way to scramble them."  
  
"And what does the energy crystal have to do with-"  
  
Dirk felt his jaw tremble as the terrible realization hit home.  
  
***  
  
Making sure that she was prepared was often the hardest part of any battle for Sally. She knew she had be ready for anything, but she could only carry so much before it started to become cumbersome. What if she left the medical kit behind only to have someone get shot and need immediate aid? She couldn't see into the future to know what would happen. And this time was even worse. It would only be her, Sonic, and Dulcy out there. Sure, Dulcy was able to carry a lot, but with her claustrophobia it was unlikely that they could take her down to Lower Mobius.  
  
Sally stared at the gear laid out in front of her, and made her decision.  
  
First was Nicole. That was the easiest choice. There had never been a mission she had gone on without her, and she clipped on to her boot and stayed out of the way until needed.  
  
The power ring was the next obvious choice. Sally picked up the torus, turning it over lightly in her hands. She never understood the eldritch energy that glowed within it, but she couldn't argue with its worth. Sonic would carry this in his small backpack.  
  
The next was an ancient piece of technology that had scavenged from Robotnik's junkyards. Sally had guessed that the antique laser rifle must've seen use as far back as the Great War; it was that beat up. It was one of the only weapons the Freedom Fighters had in their possession, and it only rarely saw use. Not only did Sally not believe in weapons, but a general rule of Freedom Fighting held that if you were in deep enough trouble to have to use a gun, you were probably done for anyway.  
  
Sally didn't like having to use it, but she also didn't like confronting Robotnik's forces this directly. The rifle would provide some measure of security, at least. It was more than capable of destroying a SWATbot, and she was dexterous enough have a decent aim.  
  
She slid a single clip into the underside of the weapon. A read-out on the top of the rifle flickered to life as she did so. There was enough energy in the clip's power cells for at least twenty-five shots. She doubted she'd need more than that. A final push on a stubborn lever snapped the clip securely into place.  
  
There was a strap on the rifle. She slung it around her shoulder. If she was forced to run fast, the rifle would disrupt her balance and she'd have to ditch it. But it might come in handy before than.  
  
Neither she nor Sonic had the room to carry the largish medical kit. Dulcy would have to tuck into her pouch. Sally uttered a silent hope that they wouldn't need it when the dragon wasn't around.  
  
She left the hut, forcing herself to turn her back on the other gear, and not think about it. All they had to do was apply the tools they had, and they would win, she knew. Bunnie and Rotor would soon be back at Knothole, just like they always were.  
  
Right?  
  
Dark thoughts rushed to fill in the forced gap in her mind. Nicole's calmly worded description of the Laurentis nodule had shaken her more than she'd like to admit. And Bunnie had know about it all along. Sally kept asking herself why one of her best friends had kept something like this hidden, and couldn't come up with an answer. Bunnie had lied to her. There was no other explanation.  
  
And Lower Mobius was going to suffer for Bunnie's lies.  
  
Sally mulled on this as she walked closer to the power ring grotto, the weight of the rifle on her back a constant reminder of the deadly seriousness of the situation.  
  
"Yo, Sal, you ready yet?"  
  
Sonic and Dulcy were waiting for her. Sonic was already on Dulcy's back, wearing his practiced expression of impatience.  
  
"I think I've got everything we're going to need," Sally said, slow to be stirred back into the real world. "Dulcy, I'm gonna need you to carry this." She handed the dragon the medical kit.  
  
Dulcy sniffed it curiously for a moment. "What's one *more* smelly old thing matter?"  
  
"You're just smelling the anesthetic, Dulcy. It's not that bad."  
  
"Says you."  
  
Sonic glanced down at Sally. "You look like you've got somethin' on your mind, Sal." The hedgehog could be surprisingly perceptive sometimes. When he wanted to be.  
  
"Yeah. Bunnie."  
  
"You're worried about the Laurentis-whazzit?"  
  
Sally met Sonic's gaze dead-on. "Why didn't she tell us about it, Sonic?"  
  
"Maybe she just didn't know," he offered.  
  
"No. I checked Nicole's logs. Bunnie's known about the nodule, and its transmitter, for over two years. She just didn't want to tell us. I can't imagine what would make her want to lie to us about it."  
  
Sonic shrugged helplessly. He wanted to say something reassuring, restore everybody's faith in Bunnie, but the words just couldn't come. "Well, we never asked," he joked weakly. The line fell flat.  
  
"That's no excuse. For two years she knew that her very presence placed all of Knothole at risk. She just never said anything." Sally stopped short of using the word 'betrayal'. She couldn't bring herself to. For Bunnie to betray them like this was almost unthinkable, the concept itself was an oxymoron. "This hurts, Sonic," she admitted, "this hurts a lot. And I just don't know what we're going to do about it. She lied to us."  
  
"Hey, stop right there," Sonic said. "I only know two things right now: Bunnie and Rotor are out there in mondo danger, and that we're in a position to do something about it."  
  
Dulcy nodded. "It doesn't really matter, Sally. All we have to do is get out there and fight the good fight. Stuff like lies and pointing fingers can come later."  
  
Sally bit her lower lip, looking down at the ground.  
  
"Lies or no, we have friends to save, Sal," Sonic said.  
  
Sally accepted Dulcy's extended hand, using it to pull herself up onto the dragon's back. She slid into a seated position, right behind Sonic.  
  
"You're right. There are lives that need saving right now." **But that doesn't mean that the hurt is gone,** she added silently.  
  
Sonic held his fist out to Sally. She laid her own fist on top, then held it steady as he brought his up and over to do the same thing again. The ritual concluded when they held their hands together in the universal good- luck symbol of a thumbs-up.  
  
"Let's do it do it."  
  
***  
  
The boundary between the old Lower Mobius and the new was instantly distinguishable. The older buildings, rock structures that had been built long before the Great War shook Mobius, were composed only of crumbling stone and mortar. They had been co-opted by the first villagers, and restructured to different purposes. When the city had become too small to accommodate its growing population, the villagers had expanded. The newer structures were composed mostly of cleaner, well-chiseled rock and wood taken from the surface. Architects must have been in short supply among the city's population, because some of the wood structures looked haphazardly unstable. They all stood sturdily enough, but Bunnie couldn't imagine how.  
  
There was no one left on the streets. By now the city was entirely deserted except for the distant market square. Even the evacuation sirens had been reduced in volume, making their distant wail decidedly haunting. Bunnie was wandering the streets of amongst the newer buildings searching for someone, anyone, she could help. For a long while, the only thing she found was unusually moist air registering on her senses.  
  
Voices carrying across the street caught her attention. One was female, the other male, both were agitated. She found herself running towards the source, the danger the people were in the only thought on her mind. More vehicles were arriving by the minute. The second convoy was getting ready to leave, and everybody in left in the city had to be on it, or they would die.  
  
Bunnie rounded the corner, metal feet involuntarily kicking up clouds of dust behind her. She saw two people clustered around an open doorway, a lioness and a buck. Bunnie recognized them both. They were part of the group of new citizens Dirk had been leading around the city before the beacon had been activated.  
  
"We have to get the convoy!" the female was saying, speaking urgently. "If we run we can still make it."  
  
"And if we don't we'll be trapped in the center of the city," the buck said uncertainly, "we have to find a side tunnel nearby. That's what our instructions are if we're near the cavern wall."  
  
The two were obviously newcomers to the city, unfamiliar with its layout. Bunnie knew more than they did. There were no side exits anywhere by this side of the city cavern. The fastest way for them to get out would be through the convoy, but if they hesitated too long they would miss it.  
  
Bunnie ran faster, waving and shouting at them. Somehow they overlooked her completely, too absorbed in the argument.  
  
"We have to go now! To the convoy!"  
  
"Gail, please," the buck insisted, backing into the wood-constructed house. "I-I think that boar gave us a map somewhere along the way. Let me find it."  
  
She gave him a desperate look, wanting so much to start running but unwilling to leave him behind.  
  
"Hey!"  
  
The lioness finally noticed Bunnie's voice above the sirens. She whirled around frantically, eyes pleading for back up.  
  
"Y'all have to get out of here, now! Get to the market!"  
  
Gail turned towards the house. "Did you hear that? Now! I don't want to leave you behind!"  
  
"Hold on," the voice came from inside the house. "I think I've almost found it."  
  
Bunnie gave a quick mental curse at the stupid obstinacy of the male psyche. Judging by the pained expression on the lioness's face, she was doing the same, as if she hated him and loved him all at once.  
  
"Get out here!" they both shouted in unison.  
  
"Here it is," came the triumphant reply. "I found-"  
  
*CRA-ACKKKK*  
  
It was a horrible noise, the sound of wet wood giving away or bone splintering. Shock alone knocked the lioness's breath out of her as the house began collapse before her. The first floor seemed to almost disappear, the door the buck had gone through swallowed by a collapsing structure.  
  
Pieces of the wall on the second story seemed to bend and buckle out, pulled down by gravity and racing towards the ground. Bunnie didn't have time to think, only act. She instinctively jumped away from the building, bionic arm grabbing Gail and shoving her away from the wall of debris. They both landed hard, next to each other, just as the wall and roof of the house slammed into the ground they had been standing on.  
  
Bunnie used her own body to shield Gail's from whatever debris still managed to hit them. She felt heavy pieces of stone and wood hit her metallic legs. Had they been flesh, they surely would've been damaged by the onslaught.  
  
An instant after the debris hit the ground, a cloud of dust spilled across the street, washing over both Bunnie and Gail and momentarily hiding the rest of the city from view.  
  
Gail wasn't kept down for long. No sooner had the debris began to settle then she was up on her feet and running towards the debris, pure horror frozen on her face.  
  
"Thaddeus!"  
  
Looking at the remains of the house, it was obvious what had happened. Bunnie had thought that the air in this part of the cavern was uncomfortably moist, maybe due to an error in the city's environment regulators. The wooden support beams must have begun to rot in the humidity.  
  
It turned out that the buildings that looked so incapable of supporting themselves actually weren't.  
  
"Oh, god, not now!" Gail cried, kneeling down to desperately claw at the piles of heavy rubble. Of the buck that had been inside, there was no sign. "Any time but now! Thaddeus!"  
  
There was time to think about what to do now, but Bunnie didn't need to. She was instantly upon the settling debris, trying to remember where the buck had been last. If there wasn't a vocal reply, then the buck was either unconscious, or dead.  
  
The odds did not look good.  
  
Bunnie took Gail by the arm, trying to gently move her away from the ruined house, but she refused. "Please, y'all have to get the convoy as soon as you can. Ah'll look for 'im, Ah promise."  
  
"I'm not leaving my husband," she said, sounding just as stubborn as the buck. Just from her tone, Bunnie could tell that there was little she could do to change her mind. Bunnie couldn't bring herself to use her augmented strength to drag the lioness to market square. Gail sounded resolute enough that Bunnie was sure she would fight back, anyway.  
  
The lioness was determined, that much was for sure, but that didn't mean she wasn't vulnerable. She looked back up at Bunnie. "Please... can you help?"  
  
There wasn't much of a choice. Sparing a worried glance back at the convoy gathering at market square, Bunnie tried to determine where to begin digging.  
  
***  
  
A lone hover car, the second of the two diminutive Sewer Crawler models left ditched outside the Emergency Operations center, took off and split away from the larger group converging at the center of town. The twin jets of thruster exhaust looked desolately lonely in the otherwise empty expanse of the cavern. Just below, the evacuation was nearing its final stages, but the pilot of the hover car paid it no mind.  
  
His mind was on his last meeting with Griff, and the last instructions he had received. Griff had Dirk's held shoulder as he gave his final orders, as if he were afraid it would be the last time that the two would ever see each other. Dirk didn't know what the mountain goat he planned, and he didn't want to know. The part of the operation he had been asked to carry out was menacing enough.  
  
The glare of Lower Mobius's energy crystal only got brighter as he neared the control room above. Dirk squinted against the glare, yet never took his eyes off of the crystal. Alone, with only the rumble of the engines behind him, he finally had time to reflect on the situation he had been thrust in. He had trouble believing that this would be the last day he'd see the familiar energy crystal. The concept was as unthinkable as the sun not rising in the morning.  
  
He coasted closer and closer, almost losing himself in the yellow- green glare. The hover car coasted between the four struts securing the crystal solidly to the cavern roof, rising to the gantry way just above. Dirk kept wondering how something like this could happen to something so tranquil.  
  
The top of the convertible hover car clicked open, letting the light breeze of motion inside. The pilot's side door lowered into a ramp, leading into an empty air dozens of stories above the crowded street below. Carefully, he maneuvered the hover car until the ramp was just touching the scaffolding outside, and left the car to hover.  
  
Without looking down, he stepped outside, onto the thin platform. Beads of sweat trickled underneath the fur on his brow. It wasn't because of the height; he had been here hundreds of times before, but only to monitor the crystal's power generation. The severity of his task heightened his senses, made him all the more nervous.  
  
Dirk clung to the side of the gantry, hugging the outside of the control room walls until he was able to move towards the control room's open door. He slipped inside and into darkness, fumbling for the light switch. The room obediently bathed itself in illumination.  
  
The control room was perched at the very top of the enormous energy crystal, with no easy way to access it from the ground. Very rarely were there more than two people up here. Most of the time there was no one at all. With events proceeding as they were, however, he found the desolation utterly unnerving. Having someone to talk to would make this so much easier.  
  
The power rock, a gift from the Knothole Freedom Fighters, lay on a platform nearby, thrumming with energy. Power seemed to hum in the air all around it. It had been in the same place for over a year, and hadn't shown any sign of exhausting its seemingly limitless power supply yet. It was the source of all the crystal's energy, and was responsible for channeling power back and forth between the crystal and the city reserves. Everything had come from something so small. It was the gift that kept giving. Dirk hated to be the one to force it to stop.  
  
He walked forward, eyes scanning over the consoles until he found the one he wanted. There were no chairs here, so he would have to stand. These computers were pre-Great War, not equipped with voice interfaces. Dirk flexed his wrists and began typing.  
  
"OPEN," the words appeared on the monitor as his fingers pressed each key, "SUBROUTINE POWER_RELAY."  
  
The monitor blinked, his own words replaced by column after column of computer code. These were the instructions that the computer followed when channeling power between the Knothole rock and the crystal itself. The vigilant automatic programs that ensured that life as Lower Mobius knew it could continue.  
  
"EDIT: LINE 362."  
  
The monitor blinked again, scrolling down until it found the requested block of code. When Dirk had first seen these computers, this program had seemed like a foreign language. Now he was able to quickly decipher the programming code, see what each phrase and word would do. Line 362 contained information essential to the process of channeling unspent energy from the crystal back to the power rock: one of the many pieces of the puzzle required to prevent a catastrophic overload.  
  
Dirk made sure that the entire line was selected, and then hit the 'Delete' key.  
  
***  
  
"Not now," the lioness Gail repeated to herself, on her hands and knees stubbornly picking apart the piles of debris piece of piece. "Why did this have to happen now?"  
  
Bunnie circled the remains of the house, trying to find any sign of a survivor within. The devastation was total. To be so completely destroyed from losing a single beam, the entire building must have been on the verge of complete structural collapse long before Bunnie came here.  
  
Bunnie wondered why bad luck seemed to follow her around like the plague. As if the Laurentis transmitter weren't bad enough, her subconscious couldn't help but escape the impression that the building had collapsed just because of her mere presence. There was no sign of the buck at all, and the distant rumble of the convoy's collective engines was growing disturbingly louder.  
  
"Does this happen often?" she asked. Maybe talking would calm the lioness down.  
  
Gail shook her head. She was so distraught that the motion looked like a frantic trembling then a real gesture. "No, you hear stories, but -- no. Even with the dehumidifiers on this side of the cavern on the fritz, I never thought that I could take those stories seriously."  
  
For moment, her face lit up with hope. "Thaddeus?" She tossed aside a crushed remnant of a sheet rock wall. When that revealed nothing, her face crumpled.  
  
"Where is he?"  
  
"You should just go," Bunnie insisted. "Ah'll keep lookin' for 'im, while you get to the convoy."  
  
"I'd never be able to be able to forgive myself if I just left him to die," Gail said sadly.  
  
Although they were in it through different reasons, love and guilt, they were both bound to this spot by a duty to save a life. Bunnie circled around to the left, searching for some place, any place, to start digging. There wasn't enough time to search through everything. She had to know exactly where the buck was.  
  
It was a problem solved almost immediately, though not by a method Bunnie at all liked. As she sorted through the rubble, her left toe landed a puddle of warm, sticky liquid. She looked down it just as the rich coppery scent hit her nose. Blood. It was beginning to pool on the ground and seeping out from underneath the wreckage. She froze.  
  
Gail saw Bunnie stop, and glanced over in her direction. She saw what Bunnie had stepped in. "Oh god."  
  
Instinct kicked in. Act first, fret later. "He's over here." Bunnie immediately began to shove aside the first few piles of smaller objects.  
  
Gail rushed over, and immediately dug her hands in to help. They hadn't seen any sign of the buck other than the blood, and it wasn't going to be an easy dig. There were larger beams cluttered all around here, even a section of the stairwell that had miraculously remained whole lay nearby. All of it barred their path.  
  
Bunnie cleared away the pieces of smaller debris first. Pieces of shattered sheet rock, plaster, split wood. Gail helped clear the area near the center, and when Bunnie reached to the remove the twentieth pile of smaller wreckage, she felt the buck's hand underneath hers. Reassuringly warm, but limp.  
  
Gail's cry of relief broke off in a choked sob. The buck, Thaddeus, was almost directly underneath the larger intact beams and pieces of thick stone wall several times larger than an average person. Desperately, she tried pulling away the largest beam between them and the buck. Her sizable muscles strained to no avail: the beam remained solidly in place.  
  
"Stand back, sugar," Bunnie warned her, grabbing the beam's midpoint with her left arm.  
  
"What?" Gail trailed off, eyes wide and staring at Bunnie's arm, as if noticing her biomechanical limbs for the first time. "What are you..."  
  
Her organic hand gripped tightly around the endpoint of the beam for support, Bunnie began to *lift*. The servos and motors in her elbow joint strained to keep up with the sudden demand placed on them. The false muscles labored against the weight of the rubble. She felt the whir of the Laurentis nodule in her leg as it struggled to assign the necessary power reserves in time.  
  
Slowly, the beam began to move upward.  
  
Bunnie moved her right leg forward, knees bending to take some of the beam's impossible weight. She hear motors whine with stress, but with a total of three artificial limbs doing the work, she could more than handle it. It was about time her augmentations got put to good use, she thought to herself.  
  
Gritting her teeth for one last thrust, Bunnie heaved the weight sideways and out into the street. She loosened her grip on it just as her left arm swung outwards, letting it go.  
  
The beam landed forcefully in the street a second and two meters later. The corner that struck the dirt road actually managed to significantly dent the ground underneath. The clanging noise of the impact echoed up and down the empty streets. Bunnie let the air out of her lungs, heaving a sharp sigh of exhaustion, but already prepared for more heavy lifting.  
  
Gail stared at her. "How did you do that?"  
  
"Tell ya later," Bunnie said, "just keep diggin' 'im out of there." 


	7. No Escape

"EDIT: LINE 724," Dirk typed for what seemed like the thousandth time. He removed the code, this time a component of the crystal's power regulators. The power rock sat on a console nearby, glowing brighter by the minute, casting angry and accusing spikes of light at him.  
  
His hand-held radio blipped at him, adding to the array of disapproving warning lights and sirens in the background. Dirk knew who it would be before he switched the device on, and what they would say.  
  
"How long, Griff?" he asked.  
  
There was a slight pause. Griff's voice came back to him riddled with self- doubt. "Little over six minutes now. Rotor picked up Robotnik's armada a little early, but that's only because it's so damn large." Dirk couldn't remember the last time he had heard Griff curse, but it was one of the least surreal things confronting him right now. "Depending on which tunnel they take, of course."  
  
"How many are there?" Dirk asked, still frantically typing. Another warning light blinked urgently at him. He ignored it.  
  
"Too damn many. The numbers are so big that I'm having Rotor double-check them just be sure that the first count was accurate." Another pause, and Griff's voice was even more shaky when it came back. "Dirk, we didn't even know Robotnik *had* that many hover units."  
  
Dirk leaned over the control room's console, sparing the time for a quick glance out the window. Against the overwhelming glare of the crystal the city below was difficult to make out. "The convoy's not quite ready to leave yet. Give it two more minutes at the least."  
  
"That's cutting it far too close. Even if they get out of the cavern in time, Robotnik will still be able to trace them. Their thruster exhaust will be an arrow pointing straight to the rendezvous point. That's why we have to destroy the crystal, Dirk. Distract him long enough for our people to get away." Griff sounded as if he were only trying to convince himself. Dirk didn't comment on it.  
  
The radio channel crackled in quiet static.  
  
"How long until detonation?" Griff asked at last.  
  
Dirk was about to answer that he didn't know when the control room lights cut out, replaced by red-tinted emergency illumination. One siren blared above them all, one that he had never heard before. It must've been from one of the few monitoring programs left intact.  
  
"IMMEDIATE HAZARD," A synthetic voice buzzed over ancient speakers. It chilled Dirk to the bone. "CRITICAL OVERLOAD FAILURE, SEVEN MINUTES AND TWENTY-EIGHT SECONDS. EVACUATE TO A MINIMUM SAFE DISTANCE OF THREE HUNDRED METERS."  
  
"You heard the magic voice," Dirk said, struggling to keep his fear concealed. "Seven-and-a-half minutes."  
  
"Just hope that'll be good enough..."  
  
Another voice came on over the comm, the walrus's. He was atypically tense. "Dirk, do you see Bunnie anywhere up there?"  
  
The half-metal rabbit? Dirk bit back an irate reply. "From up here I can't see anybody. Why?"  
  
"I can't find her on any of the city's cameras."  
  
Griff's voice cut Rotor off. "Dirk, if you're done up there... just leave the city now. Go with the rest of the evacuation convoy."  
  
"What about you, Griff? That only leaves one hover car left for you, Rotor, and the rabbit. And if she's got a beacon in her leg..."  
  
Whatever self-doubt had been in Griff's voice evaporated. "Beacon or no, she's coming with us. Don't worry, we'll get her as far away from the rendezvous point as possible."  
  
"And then what?" Dirk asked. "Robotnik will still be able to track the beacon to your car."  
  
"We'll figure part that out then. The important thing is making sure that everyone survives."  
  
"You won't if she's with you," he said bluntly.  
  
"We'll see. Just clear out of the control room now. Since I won't... be there when the last convoy reaches the rendezvous point, I making you chairman pro tem for the duration of the emergency. If anything actually does happen to me, that'll be a permanent change."  
  
"I can't do your job, Griff," Dirk implored, on the verge of giving up entirely. "Just *please* make sure that you survive whatever happens out there."  
  
"No promises. I'm not sure I even want to. Good luck, Dirk." The other end of the channel clicked off before Dirk could even ask what he had meant.  
  
"CRITICAL OVERLOAD FAILURE, SEVEN MINUTES AND ZERO SECONDS," the computer intoned threateningly.  
  
"Oh, hells..."  
  
Dirk dashed towards the car still hovering outside, wishing for the first time in years that he wasn't so committed to following orders.  
  
***  
  
"I don't see any more evac vehicles in the air," Gail said urgently. "I think they've all landed at market square." It was true; the rumble of thrusters had faded to a dull roar. Bunnie was too absorbed in the task at hand to look behind her, but she could image the crowds of people beginning to pile into trucks and cargo tankers. The pilots and militia staff would check to make sure that there was no one left behind at the market. They wouldn't be able to see her and Gail way back here.  
  
These two people *had* to get to the convoy before it left. There wasn't any other way out of the city from here.  
  
"Don't worry about it," Bunnie said, more to herself than the lioness. "Let's concentrate on getting' 'im out of here first, then we'll worry about makin' the convoy."  
  
Gail didn't need to be told twice. Bunnie hefted another girder, this one heavier than the last. She felt a knee joint pop under the stress, ignored it. She was grateful for Gail's help; she was helping keep the girder balanced as Bunnie lifted. A quick swing to the left, in unison, and the girder landed next to the beam.  
  
Nothing mattered besides this, not the convoy, not the city, not herself, nothing. After a few minutes, the thoughts no longer intruded on her mind. The only thing left was herself, the obstacle, and the victim.  
  
She had to help.  
  
The chunk of solid staircase disintegrated under a solid uppercut punch from her left arm, smashing itself into more manageable chunks without endangering the person pinned underneath. Gail scrambled to remove its remains, tossing piece after piece aside. Eventually, a face was visible in the trash.  
  
The buck was in sorry shape. His entire head was coated in a solid white sheet of dust; whatever wasn't was covered in blood. His sizable nose was obviously broken judging by the amount of blood covering his muzzle. There were more gashes and bruises on his forehead. Something had obviously struck him in the face when the structure had collapsed. The rest of his body was still pinned underneath the garbage, but the damage was likely as severe.  
  
Bunnie waited, watching the buck's body and urging to the lioness to be quiet for a moment. The scene was as still as a cemetery for a moment. Then the debris stirred, and a quiet hiss of air escaped his mouth. He was still breathing.  
  
Then it was back to digging. Nothing mattered except the digging. She allowed her conscious to lose itself amongst the repetitive motions of lifting and throwing. Freeing. Saving. Only once did she glance up from the debris.  
  
When the sun went out.  
  
Illumination across the entire cavern flickered and dimmed for a moment, as if an instant twilight were settling across the city. Something was happening to the mammoth energy crystal. Violent flashes and surges of power played across the reflective surface. The entire display was visually fierce but eerily silent. For a terrible moment, the crystal went completely dark, engulfing the entire city in pitch blackness. Bunnie found herself digging without the use of her eyes. Spanning even the city's length she could hear the cries of surprise and terror in market square.  
  
Nothing like this had ever happened in the city's decade-long history. The power crystal had come close to puttering out of energy a few times, but had never actually been completely shut off.  
  
Then a warm glow began to build back up in the crystal, slowly but inexorably shedding light across the city. It was different, though: this time the light wasn't a thrumming green-yellow hue but instead an incendiary orange. The color of fire. Something was wrong with the crystal but Bunnie couldn't tell what.  
  
And as long as it didn't interfere with rescuing the buck, it didn't matter either. Cursing herself for allowing it to distract her, Bunnie immediately turned back to the rubble, joined a second later by Gail. Neither of them commented on the crystal's abrupt power cut-off.  
  
Another girder joined the other two on the empty street, landing with a strong blow. The buck's arm was free; there were another two beams covering his midsection and left leg. She and Gail grabbed the first beam and swung it out to join the others.  
  
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a trail of white-hot thruster exhaust streak away from the energy crystal's control tower. Whoever had altered the crystal was leaving. Bunnie merely noted it and filed the thought away. For now her mind was completely consumed by the buck's predicament.  
  
Last girder. Lift, heave, done. The buck was free at last. Without speaking, Bunnie grabbed his left shoulder, Gail the right. Being mindful not to aggravate his already extensive injuries, they lifted his body out of the wreckage and set him back down on the street.  
  
The buck coughed, a trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his lips. Thankfully, it was coming from a cut inside his mouth, and not from any internal damage. His left leg was twisted several times upon itself, obviously broken in more than one place. His eyes flickered open for a moment, painted red and glazed over by pain, then shut again.  
  
"Can you hear me?" the lioness asked anxiously. "Can you speak?"  
  
Thaddeus seemed to be hovering between pain-induced faint and semi-lucid consciousness. He coughed and his head trembled in what Bunnie could only assume was a nod. Sympathy overwhelmed her, but she resisted the urge to blame herself. The house would have collapsed regardless of the Laurentis transmitter. She had been there to help.  
  
He wasn't going to be easy to move, though. The buck was incapable of walking, and with the broken leg they would have a hard time carrying him. There wasn't much choice, though. Bunnie slung his arm over her shoulder and motioned for Gail to do the same with the other.  
  
"We've got to git movin'," Bunnie said, when Gail appeared reluctant to touch him. "Ya can have a doctor dress 'is wounds when we reach the convoy, but we have to git there first."  
  
Gail nodded slowly, steeling herself for the grisly job. Thaddeus grimaced in pain when they lifted him, but the pressure was soon off his leg when Bunnie and Gail were able to completely support his weight between the two of them. Together, they began hobbling away from the ruined house.  
  
Time seemed to evaporate. Nothing mattered aside from the task at hand. Bunnie couldn't tell how much time had passed when the ear-splitting sound of dozens of thrusters igniting at once began roaring throughout the chamber, but they had only moved two blocks away from the wrecked house.  
  
"Hell's bells!" Gail shouted to the empty air, stopping in her tracks. "Don't do this."  
  
Dozens of vehicles sped away from market square, dispersing towards tunnel exits on the cavern wall. Horror numbed Bunnie's heart as they flew directly overhead, neither seeing nor caring about the three people left behind.  
  
"No!" Gail howled.  
  
The convoy was gone. Gail watched them go, shoulders slumping when the last one finally disappeared. The lioness sucked in a shaky breath of air, a unbearably hollow sound in the suddenly empty city.  
  
After a long moment, she asked, "What can we do now?"  
  
Bunnie kept hearing Sally's voice in her ear, repeating the second cardinal rule of the Freedom Fighters: Act first, fret later. Options ticked off in her mind. There were distressingly few of them.  
  
"We're not the only ones left in the city," she said. "Ah have some friends still back at the emergency control center. Ah'm sure they have a car somewhere with them." As soon as the words came out of her mouth, Bunnie knew that wasn't an option. "But..."  
  
"But what?"  
  
"Ah'll be traveling with them. Ah can't let you come."  
  
Confusion mingled with a dozen other unreadable emotions in the lioness's eye. "Why not?"  
  
"Because if you're with me, then Robotnik will- Ah mean he'll track- what Ah mean to say is it's too dangerous. Ah can't let you die with me. Too many people already will."  
  
There were dozens of ways that Gail could have reacted to that. Anger. Disbelief. Fury. All of which would be legitimate. Fortunately, the lioness must've felt that Bunnie had done too much to help to turn around and betray them now. "How else can we escape, then?"  
  
Bunnie tried to think of hover vehicles that wouldn't be commandeered by the evacuation convoy. Besides the car she, Griff, and Rotor would need, there wasn't much left in the city. The convoy would have taken everything registered in the city, from recreation vehicles to cargo transports. Only foreign vehicles would have been left behind.  
  
"The cargo sled!" she burst out.  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"Ah almost forget about it. Ah parked the cargo sled just a few blocks from here," Bunnie pointed towards a side street between them and market square. "If it hasn't been taken in the panic, we can still make it."  
  
"Let's go, then," Gail said.  
  
With Thaddeus still slung over their shoulders, they began hobbling down the street again.  
  
***  
  
"Squadrons one, three, and four, change your heading by three degrees left parallel." The control panels on the flight deck of Robotnik's command ship hummed with electricity, but that wasn't the only palpable sense of power in the room. Snively had the power to change the world with a spoken command. Out the window before him, he saw the battalion of hover units change position as soon as he was done speaking. "Squadron two, assume vanguard flank position."  
  
Robotnik sat and stared at his nephew. Snively didn't mind at all; the fat man was surprisingly quiet. The only time he never said anything was when he approved of Snively's work, or was utterly overcome by determination. Or both.  
  
"All units standby to break formation. Charge laser cannons and prepare for attack," Snively ordered.  
  
The armada of hover units had left Robotropolis only twenty minutes ago, and already the city was just a smudge of smog on the horizon. Over fifty vehicles dotted the sky over the Great Forest, with the command ship nestled snugly in the center of the formation.  
  
Snively turned to his uncle. "All hover units ready as you ordered, sir. We'll have over a dozen left with us on the surface while the rest of them go underground."  
  
"Very good, Snively. Are they prepared for subterranean combat?"  
  
"Yes, sir, modified pilot AI ready and waiting." During the flight, Snively had worked frantically to upload maps of the caverns below to the SWATbot pilots, and retooling their combat AIs to be able to work in limited space. There were still a few rough edges in the program, but the sheer numbers of hover units would be more than capable of overwhelming any possible opposition.  
  
The units assigned to attack would break position as soon as they were positioned directly above the target cavern. The ground below was unusually rocky, and riddled with large caverns. Many of them had been drilled artificially before the Great War, and were more than wide enough to accommodate the hover units. The hover units would take those tunnels to the cavern below. And to Bunnie Rabbot.  
  
"What about the mortar cannons?"  
  
"Charged, sir." The name was a bit of a misnomer, Snively knew. To say mortar implied projectiles. The newly installed weaponry perched on the bottom of the command ship was merely an array of specialized high- range, high-impact laser cannons. But the overall effect was close enough to the actual name. The cannons had only been field tested twice before, but each time they had proved the most powerful ever deployed on a battlefield in recent history. The explosions from each laser impact could bludgeon anything apart, and it had an effective range of over five kilometers.  
  
If they used it against the rabbit, she would never know what had hit her.  
  
"Very good. Very good indeed, Snively. Transfer tactical command over to me."  
  
"You, sir?" Snively asked, voice begging clarification.  
  
"I want to give the attack orders myself."  
  
"Yes, sir. Tactical command is yours."  
  
Robotnik's teeth glinted in the glow of the consoles. Below him, the massive task force waited to be thrown against the rabbit.  
  
"Squadrons one, three, and four... advance!"  
  
Dozens of hover units broke formation and charged to the ground below, swallowed up by the inky black of the rocky caverns in minutes. Snively punched up a tactical display, one that showed a map of the tunnels and the target cavern, with the hover units positions overlaid on top.  
  
"ETA three minutes," he reported. 


	8. Fireflight

"That's it," Bunnie said as they rounded the corner, still supporting the buck's not-insubstantial weight between them. The Knothole cargo sled had miraculously remained untouched during the chaos of the evacuation, and was sitting calmly at the end of the road, right where she had left it. "It's still here."  
  
Gail muttered something gratefully under her breath. Bunnie thought it was a prayer, and didn't ask.  
  
"Y'all know how to drive one of these things?" she asked.  
  
"I... think so."  
  
"Good. Let's git 'im into the passenger seat, and then you take the driver's side."  
  
"What about you?" Gail asked. Bunnie gave the passenger side door a solid kick with her metal boot, and stepped back as it swung open. Together, they lifted the half-conscious buck into the seat.  
  
"Ah'll hop into the cargo bed," she said, already lifting her legs over the side of the hold. The metal on metal of her feet hitting the empty sled was a thunderous *CLANG*. "You just drive me to the control center, the buildin' Ah told you about."  
  
Gail nodded resolutely, moving around the front of the vehicle to the other side. She stopped just as she opened the door, looking at Bunnie. "You sure you don't want to come with us?" she offered. "We can make it to the rendezvous point together."  
  
Bunnie smiled faintly. "No, trust me, you don't want me around you for too long."  
  
"But you'll die here."  
  
The simple statement no longer shattered Bunnie's resolve, like it had just minutes before. She was a dead person no matter what. Fact. But at least she could go out saving lives. Her death had meaning now. It wasn't as empty or hollow as it had seemed just minutes ago. She would die as a Freedom Fighter.  
  
'A Freedom Fighter never lets the struggle stagnate.' 'A Freedom Fighter never forfeits hope, even in the bleakest of situations.' Sally's words, which had just this morning seemed foreign and hostile, came back to her. She would never let the fight stagnate even in the face of encroaching and unstoppable death. That house would have collapsed regardless of the Laurentis nodule. She had been there to help.  
  
"Ah know what Ah'm doing. You don't want to take me with. Trust me."  
  
Gail still didn't understand, but she acknowledged that her newfound friend had at least earned the right to make this choice. "Okay, if you insist. I have to tell you one last thing, but I don't even know your name. Just in case I never see you again."  
  
"It's Bunnie."  
  
Gail nodded appreciatively, still looking up. "Thank you, Bunnie."  
  
The door closed behind Gail and clicked into place, sealing her behind the soundproof cavern of the sled's passenger compartment. A moment later, the sled's thrusters roared. The noise was ear-splittingly loud compared to when Bunnie had heard it from the relative silence of passenger cabin.  
  
Acceleration pushed her down against the rear wall of the cargo bed, and wind rushed past her head, toying with her ears. They were airborne.  
  
Streets and rooftops became a blur as the hover unit's engines roared their peak acceleration. Gail knew how to drive, all right; she was going almost recklessly fast. G-Forces became a physical phenomenon that Bunnie had to fight against to stay in a sitting position. Only when she had traveled with Sonic had she felt anything as strong. Gail's speed paid off, though: they were back at the emergency control center in seconds.  
  
The hover thrusters on the underside of the sled squirted a blast of exhaust as they settled down to the ground, hitting the dirt road directly next to a parked hover car. The sled shuddered with the landing, and Bunnie was already out and on the ground.  
  
Gail gave a last wave through the passenger compartment window, and then they were gone. The Knothole cargo sled made a beeline for the nearest tunnel exit, growing more and more distant with each moment.  
  
The control center's door was already open; no sooner had the cargo sled disappeared over the rooftop when Rotor stepped out.  
  
Bunnie couldn't remember ever being as deep in the thick of the action as she was now. She had thought that there was this hard, cold little ball inside herself where she could bundle up her feelings and emotions, pack them away so that they wouldn't interfere. Just like the determined expressions Sonic and Sally wore when they were only seconds away from death or salvation. The instant she saw Rotor that she had been dead wrong. The determination wasn't the absence or suppression of emotion; merely the delayed version of it.  
  
"You made it back!" Rotor exclaimed gratefully. "We've got a hover car ready to- oof!"  
  
Bunnie threw her arms around Rotor's shoulders, and pushed his head until his neck craned gently forward. Their lips brushed across each other's for the first time. The sensation was unexpected and wonderful, like electricity crackling through her veins.  
  
Amazing what the prospect of imminent death could do for these latent feelings.  
  
When Bunnie pulled back away, Rotor looked at her with wide, startled eyes. "There wasn't much time left," Bunnie explained. "Ah had to do it."  
  
"Bunnie, I-"  
  
Rotor's answer was cut off. Griff came out of the control center's open door. It was clear that he was shaken badly. Just like Bunnie, there was no little core he could store his emotions in. His arms and knees wobbled fearfully, and uncertainty blossomed on his face like an extension of his mind. If he noticed that Bunnie was standing with her arms around Rotor, he didn't comment. "We have to go. It's all happening now. We have to get out of here!"  
  
Bunnie lowered her arms at last, forcing herself to tear her gaze away from Rotor and look at the hover car. It was the same make and model of the vehicle that Griff had brought to Knothole on his first visit. Convertible, sleek, and yellow except for the nearly opaque tinted windows. Two tubular engines mounted on the rear underside, jutting outward.  
  
"Right," Bunnie said, after it was clear that Griff was too shaken to make any commands, "Y'all take the driver's side, and get us the hoo-hah outta here. Rotor and Ah will take the other two seats."  
  
Rotor looked back at her one last time, then got into the passenger side seat. Bunnie started to move towards the rear of the four-person passenger compartment, but stopped when she saw that Griff remained frozen in place.  
  
"Me, drive?" he said, aghast. The fright in his voice was momentarily joined by a stutter of shame. He hung his head. "But I can't - I mean I'll just crash - in no state to."  
  
"Griff, Ah only know how to fly the bulkier cargo sleds. This is your vehicle, and you're the only one who's flown it before. You're drivin'," she said firmly.  
  
"I can't," he said miserably. "I'm incapable. Please don't make me."  
  
"Oh, for heaven's sakes, Griff! Ah'll drive, then. Just get in the rear seats and git ready to help me."  
  
Moments later, the hover sled's convertible top slid shut. Bunnie examined the unfamiliar controls before her. She was used to a steering column layout like the one the old cargo hauler had used. Instead, on this car two retractable handlebars controlled steering and motion, while a third perched on top of the gearbox.  
  
In the middle of the passenger cabin, placed where both she and Rotor could see it, were bizarre combination of buttons and toggle. None of them had any immediately discernible purpose.  
  
Where would the ignition be? Bunnie tried to think back to the cargo hauler's layout. The hauler's ignition key was in an obvious position near the steering column. She guessed it had to be the same with this one. There was a switch underneath the right steering bar, pressed into the handle itself. She reached for it.  
  
"Wait! Don't touch the laser!" Griff burst out.  
  
"Well, this isn't mah vehicle. You tell me where the ignition is," she said, unable to contain her irritation.  
  
"The control panel, second button on the lowest row," he replied sheepishly.  
  
Bunnie slammed the button into the dashboard. Her seat began to vibrate with the force of the hover car's engine. She heaved a sigh of relief; it was time to get out of here.  
  
Rotor turned around suddenly, as if a switch in his head had been turned on. "Laser? Are you telling us that this ship's armed?"  
  
"Only lightly. I had the militia install them when the rat-bots were still a threat."  
  
"We can use any advantage against Robotnik. Can these help us much?"  
  
Griff shook his head. "No. Not against armored units. The most they can do against a hover unit is knock it around a little."  
  
Rotor nodded thoughtfully, and looked back at Bunnie.  
  
Bunnie grabbed the gearbox lever, and threw it upwards. She put such force into the motion that she almost lost her balance in the seat when it refused to budge. The box made an ugly noise, like metal grinding against metal.  
  
Bunnie frowned, and grabbed the lever with her biomechanical arm, pushing upward again. Still, it refused to move. She kept pushing until it felt like the lever itself was going to snap in half.  
  
"Uh-oh," Griff moaned softly.  
  
"Don't tell me," Bunnie said, "You managed to fix up everything in Lower Mobius except your car's gearshift?"  
  
"It didn't seem like a priority at the time," Griff said defensively.  
  
Bunnie pushed against the gearshift again, without avail. The lever simply refused to move. The engine hummed uselessly in the car's hood, unable to do anything unless shifted into drive.  
  
They sat helplessly on the dirt road.  
  
"One minute until the crystal detonates," Griff said under his breath. "We have to be out of here before then!"  
  
"Detonate? Y'all mean explode?"  
  
"That's what it's getting ready to do, yes." Bunnie glanced up. The incendiary orange glow of the energy crystal was growing brighter and brighter by the second. The light flickered unsteadily to some infernal beat, like an orchestra crescendoing to the climax of a violent opera.  
  
"*Why*?"  
  
"It was the only way to make sterilize the cavern and keep Robotnik from tracking the evacuation convoy," he said apologetically.  
  
Bunnie tried once more with the gearshift. "This just keeps gettin' better, doesn't it," she muttered.  
  
"I'm sorry," he exclaimed, "but-"  
  
Rotor held up a hand to silence Griff. "Not right now. Our time table just dropped again. Look ahead."  
  
Bunnie looked out the windshield, and froze.  
  
Like a swarm of black locusts, hover units poured out of the side tunnels ahead. There were dozens of them; Bunnie had never seen such a fierce display of Robotropolis's military power in all her years of fighting. Robotnik wanted her badly. Occasionally, a laser blast lanced downward and ripped a building to shreds, just for the spite of it. They began to spread out and blanket the chamber, slowly creeping towards the center of the village. And the dormant hover car.  
  
"Here they come!"  
  
***  
  
"It looks like a village of some sort, sir," Snively said. The camera feeds from dozens of different hover units were splayed out on the monitors before him, each displaying a different view of the invasion. Single story stone and wooden structures mingled with the crusty brown rock of the mammoth cavern.  
  
"More than just a city," Robotnik said. "Those rodents have built an entire city down there. Are there any visible inhabitants?"  
  
Snively scrolled through the monitors. In each view empty streets and abandoned buildings were the only things visible. "None sir. Perhaps they caught advance warning of our arrival."  
  
"Wouldn't surprise me. Well, there won't be a city here for much longer. You know what to do, Snively."  
  
"Yes, sir." He turned to the communications panel, and patched himself into the squadron circuit. "All units, pepper the city with random laser fire. Start wiping it out."  
  
No vocal affirmatives answered him, but the monitors soon began to flash with lightning-quick pulses of laser fire. The light splashed across the command ship's floor, the chaos only a mild reflection of the intense destruction below. Snively began to direct the path of demolition, his keyboard telling each unit exactly where it should be.  
  
On his master tactical monitor, a map of the city cavern was displayed along with glowing dots representing each hover unit. They began to sweep through the city.  
  
"What is that?" Robotnik's sausage-like finger was leveled towards a structure on hover unit twelve's camera view. A glowing crystal hung suspended from the ceiling, an unnatural stalactite.  
  
"I'm not sure. The squadrons' sensors only detect an immense power output and EM emissions along harmonic frequencies."  
  
"A power generator, then," Robotnik declared, satisfied. "Now, the fun part." He stood up, walking closer to the tactical monitor. His boot steps made heavy impacts against the gray metal floor. Snively imagined that he felt the command ship listing for a moment.  
  
"Where is the rabbit?"  
  
"She's still in the cavern. I'm correlating the data from the triangulation routine with our map of the cavern now, sir."  
  
A new dot began to glow brightly on the tactical display.  
  
Snively frowned at it, and then glanced back over at the camera views. In a moment, he found what he was looking for. He pointed towards hover unit fifteen's display. "There, sir. The hover car sitting at the center of town."  
  
"Yes!" Triumph inflated Robotnik's voice. "This is it, Snively! She's mine! Order hover units to land there and capture her"  
  
In response to Snively's key presses, five hover units peeled away from the larger group, heading directly towards the parked vehicle.  
  
"And if she attempts to flee in the hover car?"  
  
"Then destroy it. Dead or roboticized, both mean the same to me in the end."  
  
***  
  
"Come on, come on!" Bunnie wrenched the gearshift futilely, so hard that the lever itself began to whine in protest. She stopped pushing before the lever itself snapped in half. That would be the only thing that could make this worse.  
  
"Bunnie, we need to leave now!" Rotor half-shouted.  
  
"Ah'm tryin'! It's not budgin'!"  
  
A building five blocks away was struck twice by twenty-centimeter thick laser blasts. It disappeared underneath a liquid curtain of dust and fire. Only five of the dozens of hover units didn't fire at all. They were heading straight towards the parked hover car. Fire was spreading through Lower Mobius like a wave, the five deadly silent hover units riding in front of it like advance scouts.  
  
"The gearshift's internal components cause the problem," Griff explained quickly. "They block the moving parts. Push the lever hard to the left next time."  
  
A laser slammed into the roof of a two-story rectangular structure no more than three blocks away. The entire wall of the top floor seemed to buckle for a moment, and then it fell over with a horrible deliberateness.  
  
Bunnie forced the gearshift up and to the left. For a moment, nothing happened, the lever was still solidly stuck. She felt it begin to slip slowly upward until something inside snapped. The lever jerked easily upward.  
  
Bright yellow flames from the thrusters charred and blackened the dirt road.  
  
An explosion shattered the building across the street, a single laser splitting into in twain. The roof cracked around the burning hole created by the hover units, splitting into two parts and caving in. The walls expanded outward until they broke apart, sending shards of mortar and glass in every direction. The glass roof of the convertible hover car cracked and splintered as it was pockmarked by debris.  
  
The furious maelstrom engulfed the hover car.  
  
So this is what death looks like, Bunnie thought to herself. A whirlwind of fire and ash twisted across the windshield in front of her, threatening to break through and lick across the dashboard. She had waited for over two years for this to happen, and the display of fearsome power brought against her was everything she had known it would be.  
  
She had never imagined that destruction of this magnitude could fell so... personal.  
  
"Gun it!" Rotor shouted, terrified.  
  
There were dozens of hover units storming the city cavern. The five heading towards the hover car were almost directly overhead, maneuvering into landing positions and preparing to disgorge a platoon of SWATbots. Bunnie knew right then that she couldn't win no matter how hard she tried. She had been right hours ago, she was done for.  
  
But she would be damned if she would die without a fight.  
  
Bunnie jammed the accelerator forward.  
  
Dust and fire rushed towards the windshield, and then straight past it as the hover car passed through more or less unblemished. The street was suddenly meters below her, and growing more and more distant.  
  
A burst of laser fire arced past the car on the right, coming from behind. The five hover units had already broken formation and were scrambling to pursue. A second blast screamed past, again to the right, but only missing by a few meters this time.  
  
Bunnie twisted both handlebars to the left. The hover car turned sharply away. The cavern walls became a blur on the windshield. She only stopped turning when one of the tunnels in the cavern wall was directly in front of the car.  
  
***  
  
"She's taken off," Snively reported to his uncle. "Hover units ordered to pursue and take her down by any means necessary."  
  
Robotnik paced back and forth behind Snively, the metallic sounds of his boots against the deck a constant reminder of his presence. Every once in a while he would stop and glance at the array of monitor. Snively thought he heard him mutter something under his breath, but he couldn't make out any words. Whatever it was, he sounded excited about it.  
  
"Tactical analysis, Snively," he said at last. "What are her odds of escape?"  
  
"That would depend on the engine output of that hover car, sir." Always be one step ahead of Robotnik, that was the primary rule for working as his underling. "I've already run a cross-referencing check with Robotropolis data libraries. She's flying a retrofitted old Nimbus Island Yard model transport, one specifically designed for speed."  
  
"Speed?" The word darkened Robotnik's mood, a reminder of one of the Freedom Fighters' greatest weapons.  
  
"Yes, sir, I'm afraid that it can outrun our hover units. But we do have a significant advantage over it underground."  
  
On over a dozen monitors, the hover car pulled up and away from the city, doing a sharp port turn to finally head towards one of the cavern exits. The squadron of five hover units in pursuit did unison barrel rolls to change course accordingly. Bright flashes of laser bursts continually illuminated the cavern, deceptively silent and serene on the small monitors.  
  
"Explain," Robotnik said dubiously.  
  
"The hover car's main source of propulsion is the two thrusters mounted in the rear of the vehicle. However, they're only capable of propulsion in a single direction: forward. The car has separate, more cumbersome thrusters for steering control.  
  
"The propulsion drives in our hover units are omni-directional. We have more maneuverability. We won't have to slow down to turn corners and curves, but her car will. In short, sir, in the confined and twisting underground tunnels leading out of here, we can outrun her."  
  
"And outshoot her," Robotnik mused, watching the violence unfold. "She can't escape."  
  
"No, she can't," Snively agreed, "she's trapped."  
  
"The sooner you shoot her down, then, Snively, the happier I'll be."  
  
On the master tactical display, the hover car crept closer and closer to the exit tunnel.  
  
***  
  
Griff had just finished explaining the same thing, shouting above the whine of laser discharges and the rumble of explosions. Talking seemed to be the only thing he could do to keep his mind off the spectacle of his city being destroyed. "Gun the engines to full throttle, and gain as much distance on them as you can," he said. "Once we're in the tunnels we won't be able to."  
  
The accelerator was already giving as much as it was going too. Even though they were gaining distance on the hover units behind them, they weren't gaining anywhere near enough. Even if she didn't look behind her, the sound of their engines was threateningly close. Every once in a while a laser lanced past, always too close.  
  
"So once we're in the tunnels," she asked, risking a glance backward at Griff, "then wut?"  
  
Griff didn't answer.  
  
Bunnie knew that there would be over five hover units in the tunnel behind them. And if they could catch up, the hover car couldn't move anywhere near fast enough to avoid being an easy target.  
  
"Just try your best to lose them now," Rotor said.  
  
It sounded to her too much like Griff was saying that they were dead once they hit the tunnels. She said so.  
  
"If they're still behind us in the tunnel, we don't stand a snowball's chance," Griff said bluntly. "But we do know something that Robotnik doesn't. We'd better be clear of the city cavern in," he checked his wrist timer, "twenty-five seconds."  
  
"The crystal," Rotor said, "when it detonates it might distract Robotnik long enough for us to get away!"  
  
Scarlet energy flared to the car's port, vivid red light spilling across the dashboard. For a moment, everything was frozen in violence, like a strobe light.  
  
"Ah doubt it," Bunnie said. She hated to be a pessimist, but by this point reality had forced it on her. "The SWATbot pilot's AI won't notice at all. They're just not programmed to be troubled by distant flashing lights."  
  
"The explosion's going to be a hell of a lot bigger than a flashing light," Griff said. "We'd better be in the tunnel when it blows."  
  
Bunnie pushed the accelerator so hard that it hurt. A constant G- force kept her pushed back against the well-cushioned seat. This was the moment of truth. If they managed to lose the hover units before entering the tunnel, in all likelihood they would survive for at least another half- hour or so.  
  
Thirty minutes of life worth fighting for.  
  
She gritted her teeth, and stared at the impossibly distant cavern exit ahead. She hadn't truly appreciated how large the cavern was before. The car had almost reached its break-neck cruising velocity, but the tunnels ahead barely seemed to grow closer.  
  
Behind her, the crystal had changed from its sickly, flickering orange glow to a horribly bright yellow. It hurt to look at, but even facing away from it Bunnie could tell just from the glare how bright it was. The rock walls on every side of her were bathed in an aura of it.  
  
Griff kept his eyes rooted to his timer. "Ten seconds!"  
  
Somehow, that seemed to be the cue for the hover units to redouble their efforts. Three laser blast flashed in successive order to Bunnie's right, each one closer than the last. She realized she couldn't afford to keep a straight arrow course anymore, and twisted the steering handles to the left.  
  
The car dove in response to steering, ground tilted to an incline of thirty degrees for a moment. She instinctively expected to feel gravity shifting underneath her, and was momentarily disoriented when centripetal acceleration ensured that she didn't. The car wobbled before it righted itself, maneuver completed.  
  
Wind shook the car roughly, shuddering. Air resistance kept trying to shove the steering bars out of Bunnie's hands, but it was easy enough to counter. Her grip was iron-solid. She doubted she'd ever held on to anything as tightly as she did the car's steering.  
  
One of the cavern exits loomed ahead, a roughly triangular hole punched through the rock wall ahead, edges jagged and sharp. After fifty meters the rock ended suddenly in metal, a circular tunnel that continued ahead. Beyond that was darkness, nothing Bunnie could make out. Despite it's lack of aesthetics, though, it was the most beautiful thing she had seen in ages. Its edges were getting visibly larger. She quickly calculated that they would be on it almost the instant the energy crystal detonated.  
  
"Five," Griff continued the countdown, voice strained to the verge of tears. He had devoted over a decade of his life to this city, and now all he could do was maintain a stoic deathwatch.  
  
The hover units resumed fire almost the instant the hover car had righted itself from the maneuver. One laser burst missed wide and to the left, while another one seared the air overhead. The shots weren't as close as the others had been, but were still an obvious threat. Bunnie tried to evade their targeting routines by quickly turning to the left and right. Fast enough to present a moving target, but not sharply enough to lose their course towards the tunnel.  
  
"Four..."  
  
Rotor had his hands on the dashboard, knuckles white as he held on to it. His mouth was clamped shut, bracing for the inevitable explosion. His eyes were wide open. She couldn't remember the time he had blinked. But he was there. His mere presence seeped strength into Bunnie's arms. This was her mess, not his. He didn't deserve this. Getting him out was a goal worth fighting for, even if the odds of success weren't good.  
  
Another missed laser slammed into the cavern wall just above the tunnel exit, sending a cascade of rocks tumbling down over it. They would be clear by the time the car reached the exit. Bunnie just hoped that didn't happen just before they entered, or the avalanche would smash them to pieces.  
  
"Three..."  
  
The bright yellow glare had at least twice the intensity of the sun. She didn't dare glance behind her for fear of damaging her retinas. The light in her peripheral vision was bad enough by itself. In the reflected light the cavern wall became a still portrait of liquid metal, jagged peaks and edges distortions in an inverted surface. Bunnie wondered just how much of what she saw was illusion; the heat coming the window behind her was almost intolerable.  
  
"Two..."  
  
Rotor finally shut his eyes, sealed them tightly. He whispered something under his breath. Bunnie couldn't hear it, and didn't have the time to ask. Bunnie straightened out the car. They were coming up on the exit fast, and careless maneuvering now would only get them slammed into the cavern wall. Life would end in an apocalyptic fury, even before the energy crystal blew.  
  
The jagged edges of the triangular exit grew exponentially fast, and suddenly they engulfed the hover car. They were in the fifty-meter stretch of rock foyer, just before the metal-sided tunnel began.  
  
"One..."  
  
Bunnie resisted a powerful urge to do as Rotor had, and squeeze her eyes shut. A single slip with the steering controls would kill them all.  
  
Instead she clenched her jaw muscles tightly shut, and levered her legs to push her further back in her seat, wedging her tightly in place. With her biomechanical limbs exerting full force, only a very strong blow could knock her loose. No matter what happened now, she would be able to keep a grip on the steering handles.  
  
The walls turned to metal around the hover car as it dove into the exit tunnel. Bunnie wasn't worried about a lack of light anymore. The darkness had been burned away seconds ago.  
  
The world turned white behind her, deathly silent for an eerie moment.  
  
A wave of sound slammed into the hover car like a physical blow, jets of livid hot air suddenly and temporarily overwhelming the air resistance of the car's motion. Bunnie's ears unconsciously folded in on top of each other, trying to shut out the horrendously loud noise. The car tilted forward, shoved along by the explosion's turbulence. Bunnie tried desperately to right it again, just barely keeping the car from smashing itself to pieces on the tunnel floor.  
  
Lower Mobius incinerated itself.  
  
Gradually, the jets of air calmed, and the shuddering stopped. The noise faded away to a dull rumbling and then to silence. The hover car once again flew straight through the tunnel.  
  
The whine of military hover unit engines filled the air, still directly behind them. 


	9. Tunnel Vision

The city's power generator was behaving awfully erratically, and that worried Snively to no end. Something was going on, something he couldn't see, and that always meant something bad in the end. He had gone from the overseeing the chase of the rabbit's hover car to examining some of the sensor readings coming in from the hover unit squadrons.  
  
The first display had just started scrolling data... and then it happened.  
  
Over a third of every camera monitor mounted in the command ship shifted without warning to dead static. The entire deck suddenly flared white reflecting the glare of light suddenly coming from each and every monitor. The master tactical display blinked out of existence, unable to make sense of any of the data now pouring in.  
  
More and more cameras blinked, shuddered, or simply winked to static. The sound of Robotnik's pacing feet suddenly ended, a horrible silence coming from his direction.  
  
Within a few seconds, the worst of the event was over. The light faded, the irregular shuddering of the remaining cameras stopped as the force of the explosion abated. Only half of the invasion force had survived. Fifteen cameras left active when there should've been over thirty.  
  
"No!" Snively squealed, panic surging through his veins, a pain as sudden as whiplash.  
  
Damage reports colored an urgent red appeared on a dormant monitor, each and every one on the list flagged as critical. Burnt-out engines, blown- out windshields, ruptured hulls, there wasn't a single unscathed hover unit left in the city chamber.  
  
"What just *HAPPENED*?"  
  
"I don't know, sir!" Self-preservation prompted Snively's hands into motion, racing them across keyboards, typing frantic commands and requests for information.  
  
The master tactical display flickered back on, rushing to compensate for the loss of so many hover units. There were visibly fewer dots left on the monitor, most of them clustered around the edges of the cavern. The center of the map was an vacuum so empty it burned to look at. Outside the cavern, three dots raced away through one of the side tunnels.  
  
The camera images began to clear up. Everything up the cavern had changed, but the images were too small to make sense of it all.  
  
"Punch up full resolution video," Robotnik ordered.  
  
Snively complied nervously. The dual-purpose window and flatscreen monitor had been displaying a view of the serene Great Forest outside. Now it blinked to a large, full-color rendition of the cavern below.  
  
Snively gasped.  
  
Almost nothing in the city had been left standing. Buildings, both rock and wood, had been completely flattened, debris always lying in a pattern that scattered away from the center of the city. The damage was less severe at the outer edges where some of the buildings miraculously stood intact, whereas the market square at the center of Lower Mobius was just... gone. There were gaping holes in the floor and cavern ceiling there, with the larger one at the ceiling. Molten rock oozed down from the crater, spilling into a larger pool down below. Rock crumbled down from almost everywhere; it wouldn't be long before what was left of the city cavern collapsed and caved in on itself. Steam and smoke were a layer that covered everything.  
  
Some hover unit components were still falling gracelessly from the sky, long streams of smoke and fire painting crude lines through the air behind them.  
  
It was too obvious what had happened. Snively turned around. "The crystal exploded, sir."  
  
"I can see that, Snively," Robotnik growled, voice dangerously low. "You let them outsmart you again."  
  
"Sir!" he squealed in automatic protest, "the warning signs only came an instant before-"  
  
"SHUT UP! Trace the rabbit's position! Find her! I want her dead!"  
  
Snively glanced at the master tactical display, still putting the pieces of the trap together in his head. "She's in one of the tunnels, sir. This one has an exit terminus fifty kilometers from Robotropolis and twenty kilometers from our current position." He looked back at his uncle. "She must've known that she couldn't outrun the hover units in the tunnels, and tried to use the crystal explosion to shake them off."  
  
"And you let it work, Snively! The survivors are too far back to catch up with her!" Robotnik shouted, face a bright red. Snively wished that all the angry blood rushing to his head would make it explode.  
  
"No, sir, her plan didn't work." He leveled a finger at the tactical display, and the two dots trailing the hover car. "She tried to shake them but she didn't. She lost this one, sir!" Snively exclaimed triumphantly. The Freedom Fighter had thrown everything she had against him, and it hadn't worked. It was a wonderful feeling. "Two of the pursuing hover units survived the explosion, and are in the tunnel behind her."  
  
Robotnik's fist slammed into the console with a sound that resounded throughout the entire ship, its noise blending in with the cacophony of alarms registering the cavern's imminent collapse. "Finish her!"  
  
***  
  
The explosion had taken three of the pursuing hover units out. Bunnie hadn't seen exactly what had happened to them. The flaring white-hot light had blocked her view: whether they had been incinerated, or pulled back, or knocked into the cavern wall, she didn't know. She just knew that two of them had come through unscathed.  
  
They were more than enough to finish them off.  
  
It was as if she had become a completely different person. Bunnie felt her personality warping, changing around the situation. Adrenaline simplified the world. This was a fight for survival, pure and simple. Things kept disappearing, fear, anger, they were still there of course, but different somehow. They had stepped out of the way. The only thing that mattered was the preservation of life. It was as if the direness of the situation had forced various facets of her personality to shed and flake away. Parts of her personality that, until now, she could never have pictured herself without.  
  
Kindness didn't matter when there were military airships trying to gun you down. Empathy only got in the way in a game for survival. They were gone, all of it gone. Even a lifelong inhibition against cursing was lifted. She shouted something she'd never thought she'd hear spoken in her voice.  
  
The hover units were armed with two separate lasers: an omnidirectional cannon mounted on the roof of the airship, just above the center of the segmented windshield, and a second, more powerful one in a fixed position on the front underside. All four lasers discharged at once, sending powerful bursts spearing through the tunnel.  
  
Walls cracked and exploded around her as missed shots impacted against them, sending dangerously large pieces of debris flying through the air. But the hover car was moving fast; the second the rubble had flown far enough to be any credible danger it was already far behind even the pursuing hover units.  
  
The crystal had gone completely dead. There was no source of light in the metal cave. Shadows engulfed everything, parting only for the occasional lightning flicker of lasers. It was difficult to see the walls directly around her, let alone ahead. Bunnie only could catch occasional glimpses of what was coming next. The tunnel ended less than thirty meters ahead, curving away in a direction she couldn't make out.  
  
If she turned the wrong direction they would just careen into the wall. Which way did it turn? Right? Left? Up, down? In the sparse light she couldn't make out the vaguest hint of direction, let alone the inclination of the curve.  
  
This was it, she thought, they were going to die.  
  
"Turn left!" Rotor shouted.  
  
The handlebars moved to the left almost without thinking. The tunnel walls seemed to slope and curve around her, and then straightened back as the turn ended. It was all Bunnie could do to keep from overcompensating her way into a crash.  
  
The hover units were cloaked in the shades of darkness too, but their SWATbot pilots made the turn easier. They had infravision visors, and didn't need light. Another near-hit laser blast shook the car.  
  
"Ah need to see! Where are the headlights?" Bunnie fumbled around on the dashboard, looking for a likely button. Her hand stumbled a series of four buttons arranged in a square-shaped pattern.  
  
"Don't!" Griff said immediately, "That's the ejection toggle. You'll send us all into the ceiling!"  
  
"Then where are the headlights, Griff?" she asked through closed teeth. There was another turn coming up soon, but that was all Bunnie could see.  
  
He reached over her shoulder and hit one of the many switches lining the center of the dashboard. The car's headlights came on with a quiet *click*, calmly and peacefully doing its job in the midst of the chase. Bright shafts of light materialized in the air. There was a turn coming up, and it was up and to the right.  
  
The turn forced the car to slow down, letting the hover units behind them catch up. They obviously had no trouble making any kind of corners. Laser blasts squirted from both omnidirectional laser cannons.  
  
Bunnie grunted. The odds against them weren't as high as they would be against five hover units, but they still weren't very favorable. In fact, they were enough to rekindle the feelings of hopelessness that had been burning inside Bunnie ever since her visit with Drizit.  
  
The car accelerated again as she gunned the accelerator. The tunnel was straight for at least another hundred meters, which meant she could use the superior thrusters to her advantage for the time being. Robotnik's hover units began to slip further and further behind, firing lasers in protest as she sped ahead.  
  
Only to catch up with her when she had to decelerate to round the next corner. Two sharp explosions below the passenger compartment marked barely- missed laser shots. If they had just fired an eighth of a second sooner, the shots would have snapped Griff's car in two. It was clear they couldn't survive for much longer than a couple more turns. But if they could just make it to the open surface...  
  
The car's thrusters roared again when the passage straightened, nearly drowning out Bunnie's voice. "How long before this route hits the surface?"  
  
Griff didn't sound optimistic. "Another... five, maybe ten kilometers."  
  
"Oh, great," Bunnie choked, "then we really aren't gonna make it."  
  
The car swerved roughly around another corner, perhaps more severely than it should have. The sudden deceleration felt like a slap. It bled more sped then the thrusters could make up for. When the hover units caught up again, they actually had to brake to remain behind her. There was a moment's pause before they decelerated; as if the pilot's were having trouble decided what to do for a moment.  
  
"We're going to make it, we always do," Rotor said. "Just drive for now, Bunnie." He turned to face the rear seats, face gaunt with resolve. "Griff, I want you to tell me everything you know about the layout of this tunnel. What are we approaching?"  
  
Just drive. Wonderful. The hopelessness resurged. Just like always, Bunnie wasn't going to give up without a fight. But before that fight had been enough to get them out of anything. There wasn't any fight she could muster that would destroy the Laurentis nodule.  
  
Faced with a situation like this, she thought, what would her role model do? If that role model was in her situation, being chased by two heavily armed airships that had her outmatched every step of the way, a screaming beacon welded to her leg, responsible not only the destruction of one of the few safe havens left on Mobius, but the also the danger her closest friends were being subjected to, what would she do?  
  
What would Sally do?  
  
The question was like a logic matrix in her mind, facts and characteristic tabulating, simple and easy. The same solution every time she thought about it. Sally would do her best to drive, dodge the enemy fire, and she would trust Rotor.  
  
Bunnie's grip on the steering handles tightened.  
  
Griff, wracked by loss and fear, was less than enthusiastic about answering Rotor's question, but he spoke anyway. "It's uniform like this almost all the way throughout. This branch runs throughout almost the entirety of one of Mobotropolis's old suburban districts. The only additions we made were adding the militia posts and the usual rat-bot safeguards."  
  
"Nothing we can use against them?" Rotor asked, jerking his thumb backwards. The lightning effect of laser blasts played nightmarishly across his features.  
  
"I don't see how."  
  
Just as the hover units had been falling reassuringly behind, another corner was coming up. Bunnie just barely managed to follow it, using the brakes again too carelessly. The delay was more than enough to let the trailing hover units catch up again. The harsh *crack* of continual laser impacts grated at Bunnie's eardrums.  
  
There was no way they could survive another five kilometers of this.  
  
"We've got to find some-" Rotor cut himself off in the middle of a sentence, attention suddenly riveted on one of the hover units.  
  
One of the two pursuers had been slow to decelerate. The hover unit's course had carried it dangerously close to the hover car, almost bringing them into a collision. It response, it had overcompensated it firing its braking thrusters, and had been pushed back awkwardly far. Too which it had again overcompensated when trying to accelerate again. The overall effect was almost comical, the pilot was stuck in a loop, accelerating and then braking too fast. It seemed to be going to too great of pains to avoid crashing into the tunnel walls. After a few seconds of this, though, it straightened back out and resumed firing.  
  
"What was that?" Griff asked.  
  
"Technique," Rotor blurted, "that's their disadvantage." He had slipped back into full puzzle-solving mode, figuring aloud. "The pilots are SWATbots, computer-controlled. Their AI is normally accustomed to flying on the surface, where they have more space. Robotnik must've had to splice together new piloting routines on the fly. Hastily." His fist smacked gently against the side of his seat, mild triumph.  
  
"Yeah, well how's that going to help us now?" Bunnie asked dubiously. She was having trouble following Rotor and flying the car at the same time, but understood what he was getting at. "Just so long as their aim is deathly accurate Ah don't see how this'll help us." Just meters away from the passenger compartment another tunnel wall shattered into fire and debris, as if to emphasize her point.  
  
"Neither do I," Rotor admitted, "but it's a starting point. Something to try."  
  
The tunnel continually warped into flames and molten metal around them as Rotor paused. He frowned, leaned back, and pulled what looked like a harmless laser pen out of a pocket in the backseat. Griff stared at it, confusion evident on his face.  
  
"Bunnie, how well do you think you can react to unexpected changes in the tunnel?"  
  
"Not very well," she said sullenly.  
  
"What about the SWATbots? Not counting their advantage of multi- directional engines, how would you rate their actual reaction time to things like the curves in the tunnel?"  
  
Bunnie wondered for a moment what Rotor had in mind. Whatever it was had to happen soon. Keeping the hover car away from the constant laser blasts was straining her skills to the breaking point. He had a point, though. The physical bonus of their thrusters was what actually enabled the hover units to move faster around the curves then she did. When it came to actual reaction speed, they both seemed to hesitate for a moment. Price of a hastily made AI routine.  
  
"Worse than me," she said.  
  
He handed the pen-sized object to Griff, slapping it in the mountain goat's palm and ignoring his expression of incomprehension. "Here's what you're going to do."  
  
***  
  
"A few dozen more meters, Bunnie, hang on!" Rotor shouted.  
  
It was becoming harder and harder to maneuver away from the hover unit's laser blasts. Whatever rushed modifications might have been made to the AI, it still had a very solid and adaptable base. They were adapting to Bunnie's moves, learning. She would try and dodge away from one blast while the other hover unit would try and predict where she would fly to and shoot there. It was proving remarkably difficult to best.  
  
Bunnie was forced to try new combinations of tactics, things she wasn't too sure about. One of the hover unit's laser cannons began to glow brightly, preparing for a discharge. She immediately jerked the steering handles to port and starboard in quick succession, trying to dupe the other hover unit to believing that she would dodge to the left.  
  
She had done that move too many times before, the SWATbot pilot saw right through it. An instant before a laser would've have stabbed right into the passenger compartment, she moved to the left again. The windows to the right of the passenger compartment flared bright yellow from the near-hit explosion.  
  
Sweat beaded on her brow. Their very survival hinged on nanoseconds of action. Her action. She didn't have time to talk, didn't have time to think, only act. Another curve in the tunnel was swiftly approaching, the places where it became almost impossible to dodge blasts fast enough. Where the hover units' lasers would be closest.  
  
The first hover unit was getting ready to fire it's multidirectional laser at the same time that it was busy recharging its other cannon. This time, Bunnie feinted to the right, then pulled straight up. Time to remind the SWATbots that this was a three-dimensional game, not to mention pull them into the position she wanted them in. The shot went wide this time, and both hover units pulled upwards, closer to the ceiling.  
  
Corner. The hover car rounded it as smoothly as possible, but the deceleration still felt like an unnecessary jerk. The empty and abandoned platforms of a militia station reared in the distance ahead.  
  
Bunnie squinted, trying desperately to see in the cones of illumination coming from the headlights. This had to work. This was their last chance. The exit to the surface was still several kilometers distant, and there was nothing else they could try between here and there.  
  
There it was. While it was open, it was only a small rectangle clinging to the top of the ceiling. Their last chance.  
  
Bunnie clamped her jaw shut so tightly that her muzzle started to ache, and gunned the accelerator for all it was worth. Streaks of burning thruster exhaust marked a trail behind them.  
  
The hover units rounded the corner, laser cannons firing in unison, taking advantage of their temporary gain. Walls to Bunnie's immediate right and left imploded against each other, struck by a deluge of laser blasts meant for her. She carefully kept her position of height, using it to force the hover units to the same elevation.  
  
Rotor stopped ticking off meters, whirling around to face the rear seat. "Now, Griff!" he shouted, voice barely audible over the roaring engines and explosions.  
  
Griff's arm brought the pen-sized cylinder over to face the rectangle on the ceiling, his face frozen in anger.  
  
Bunnie jerked the steering handles downward, away from the ceiling and towards the middle of the tunnel. Her only wild hope was that Griff could compensate for her piloting.  
  
He was ready. A beam of blue-tinted light shot from the object, straight between the driver and passenger seats. The light was just that, a harmless light, not a weapon, and passed harmlessly through the windshield. It hit the rectangle dead-on, shining on the light-sensitive receptor block.  
  
The doors began to slide shut.  
  
They had once been used to keep the rat-bots from tunneling into Lower Mobius, but once that threat had been dealt with, the security doors had been made a part of the militia posts. The rectangle was only part of the door's upper half, which was gradually lowering itself from the ceiling. The doors other half was rising swiftly from the bottom of the tunnel.  
  
The laser fire ceased suddenly, as the SWATbot pilots registered this change in the environment ahead.  
  
The hover car shot neatly through the center of the open doors. Bunnie had compensated correctly, holding the car at the middle of the tunnel's vertical axis. The doors weren't yet closed far enough for her to crash into.  
  
The hover units reacted too late, trying desperately to decelerate and dive down through the center of the closing doors. They were still open wide enough to accommodate even their bulky egg-shaped visage, but compared to Bunnie they were at a major disadvantage. One of the hover units smashed to pieces against the top half of the closing door with a welcome flash of bright orange fire. It cremated all at once.  
  
The other hover unit had come down far enough to make it through. It scraped its underside against the bottom half of the door, and had one of its segmented windshield pieces broken and scraped away by debris from the other, but otherwise came through intact.  
  
"Fire braking thrusters!" Rotor ordered.  
  
Bunnie had already hit them an eight of a second ago. The SWATbot pilot was still dazed by what had just happened, flying nothing but a straight course after making it through the doors. It wasn't able to compensate for Bunnie's deceleration.  
  
She brought the car around underneath the other airship as it roared overhead. When she brought it back up again, the car was directly behind the surviving hover unit. The roles had reversed.  
  
Bunnie reached for the button underneath the right handlebar, waiting until the hover unit was aligned directly in front of her car's own laser cannons. She wasn't going to give the pilot a chance to dodge. She squeezed the trigger.  
  
Griff had been right when he said that the car's own laser cannons weren't very powerful. They didn't do much damage to Robotnik's hover unit at all, didn't even pierce the outer hull. The hover unit's armor absorbed the energy of the blast. The only thing Bunnie's laser could do to the hover unit was knock it around a little.  
  
Knock it right into the wall.  
  
The impact had been at such a high velocity that the airship didn't even have a chance to crumple and shatter before evaporated. Fire from the hover unit's crash blossomed up and around the passenger compartment as they flew directly past it. Then it was behind them, flaming wreckage growing more and more comfortingly distant.  
  
They had done it. Rotor's cry of triumph was resoundingly loud in the sealed passenger compartment.  
  
Despite the fact that this had done nothing to get rid of the Laurentis nodule, or even helped her overall situation, Bunnie couldn't keep the rebel yell from escaping her mouth.  
  
The hover car coasted, peacefully and unmolested, through the remaining kilometers of the tunnel, until it reached the terminus and spilled out into open daylight. 


	10. Respite

A quick author's note: Sorry for the delay, folks, classes and other projects are taking up more and more of my time. But it is still getting done, I've gone too far to stop now. It'll just take a little while longer than I expected. Nevertheless, thank you all for your praise so far, and here are the next installments...  
  
***  
  
Hover units raced madly across the smoldering devastation of the Lower Mobius city cavern, heading for whatever exits they could find. Rock crumbled down from the ceiling, alarmingly large cracks were beginning to creep across the walls. The entire chamber groaned bitterly, the weeping sound of an ancient massive structure beginning to destabilize. It echoed across dozens of audio receivers throughout Robotnik's command ship, tandem notes becoming a staccato melody.  
  
Snively was frantically relaying order after order to the surviving hover units still scurrying about the chamber. "All units, fall back to the surface. I repeat, fall back to the surface, now!"  
  
The detonation of the energy crystal had blown away a large section of the cavern, and melted another good portion. Although most of the molten rock had already began to cool the affect of its absence was taking a severe toll on the cave itself. Sensors that had been silently monitoring the chamber's structural integrity had been flashing urgent warning at him for minutes. It wouldn't last for much longer.  
  
The camera monitors painted a grim picture. More hover units were dying by the minute, the effects of severely damaged systems taking their tolls. An unfortunately large number of airships hadn't even heard his orders to retreat, their receiver antennas burnt away in the explosion. They remained obstinately still. But worst of all were the ones with antennas that only partially malfunctioned; one of them had even heard his order as "fall... to the surface," and had obediently done so.  
  
Two of the camera monitors at the top of the field, monitoring units #11 and #24, were relaying images of the rabbit's hover car. Snively had stopped paying attention to them a long time ago. They could take care of themselves. He had to worry about roofs caving in.  
  
The rumble steadily increased by orders of magnitude. Snively thought he detected a minute trembling in the cavern wall itself, but it could have just been camera distortion. Only about half of the remaining squadrons have even begun to flee. "I said get out of there," he hissed in frustration.  
  
When hover unit #11's monitor turned to static in his peripheral vision, his veins froze in a snap of icy cold shock. No, not that, too. Not now. The only thing that could salvage this raid in Robotnik's eyes was killing or capturing the rabbit. 11's audio receiver had just relayed what sounded like the beginning of an explosion before it vanished.  
  
He gasped, looking up just in time to see #24's camera burst into the same snowy static.  
  
On the master tactical display, two dots slowly faded out of existence, leaving only the blip of the rabbit's hover car to move peacefully away.  
  
Snively felt a large, gloved hand grab him roughly by the back of his shirt, lifting him completely out of the chair. Hot, musky air fell across the nape of his neck. The heavy sound of inhaling and exhaling sounded like Robotnik was unsuccessfully trying to control his breathing. He was more than angry.  
  
Snively's frail body was slammed against the front edge of the command ship's bridge, and held against the wall by an iron grip. His uncle's eyes burned a solid red as he leveled a finger at #24's monitor. "You have *one* chance to explain what just happened!"  
  
Snively had only seen the monitors go dead. He had no idea what to say, but knew that even if he did nothing could placate Robotnik now. He just whimpered. His feet kicked helplessly in the open air beneath him. The ground was at least twice his height away.  
  
Robotnik stared at him for a long, terrifying moment, and then let him fall gracelessly to the ground. Snively braced for the rough kick, but it never came. Robotnik stomped heavily back over to his chair, leaving his nephew wheezing for breath on the ground.  
  
"Plot intercept coordinates!" he ordered furiously. "Trace where the car will emerge from the tunnel and get us there! Ready the mortar cannons!"  
  
Snively knew what he would have to say before he even returned to his seat, but he checked the displays anyway, just to look like he was doing something. They only confirmed what he knew. "Sir, the tunnel she's in terminates at a point in the forest over twenty kilometers from our current position. She'll get there long before we even get in range to use the mortar cannons."  
  
Robotnik's fist on the arm of his chair was a thunderbolt echoing throughout the ship. "Just start moving, Snively!"  
  
The rest of the camera monitors blinked suddenly to static as the cavern collapsed on top of the few surviving hover units.  
  
***  
  
Another dull rumbling began to echo throughout the tunnel as the hover car neared the end. Griff seemed to be making a pointed effort to try and ignore it, but he was failing miserably. He kept glancing back behind the car, trying to see out into the pitch darkness. The sounds of Lower Mobius's death throes transmitted well through the metal-walled channel. Bunnie did her best to ignore it, racing the car towards the sunlight just spilling from around the next corner.  
  
When they finally reached the surface, the car sped out through an otherwise innocuous looking pipe in what must've been a water treatment plant decades ago, long before the withering stains of Robotnik's dilapidation had arrived. The abandoned suburban district had once been a part of Mobotropolis, but the forest had reclaimed most of it in the years since the coup. It quickly faded behind them, along with the sounds of the city cavern collapsing. The relief on Griff's face was obvious.  
  
The stark green of the Great Forest was a welcome sight, a sharp contrast to the dirt-brown and metal gray walls of the underground. Bunnie had thought she'd never see it again. The sunlight felt warm, refreshing, something beautifully mundane. The hover car gained altitude slowly, pulling away from the treetops.  
  
"Don't take us too high," Rotor said automatically. "The Robotropolis radar will detect-"  
  
Bunnie gently tapped the side of her right leg.  
  
"Right," he said, "never mind. I guess it doesn't really matter."  
  
Some of the buzz of victory was starting to fade. The adrenaline of the chase had worked its way through her system and was gone. Cold reality was setting in again. The Laurentis nodule was still welded tightly inside of her right leg, it's blaring beacon still leading Robotnik to the hover car. He would be back before long.  
  
She felt weary.  
  
"So where to now?" she asked.  
  
"I guess the rendezvous point is out of the question," Griff said, "and so is Knothole."  
  
"No kiddin'," Bunnie said dryly, gently turning the steering handles.  
  
The hover car thrusters roared in response, pushing the vehicle into a gentle curve. The greenery of the Great Forest became an incline for a moment, centripetal acceleration playing havoc with Bunnie's inner ears. The treetops became a featureless blur, reforming only when she stopped the curve. Just over the horizon, a massive haze of smog loomed directly ahead.  
  
"You already know where you're going," Rotor observed quietly.  
  
Bunnie nodded, hand absently slipping back to her right leg, rubbing over the nearly invisible access panel. Just underneath that metal surface the Laurentis nodule lurked. A device that had serviced her biomechanical components for years, keeping her alive, now threatened her existence. She imagined she could hear the beacon screaming, a relentless high-pitched whine.  
  
"Robotropolis," Griff said.  
  
"If y'all were tellin' the truth about that blade, then Ah don't see that Ah have much of a choice."  
  
"Even if you do manage to snatch the blade - somehow - you'll be paralyzed for life if you remove the nodule," he cautioned. "It's more likely that we'll die just trying to get there. He doesn't exactly leave the door to the roboticizer unlocked."  
  
"We'll find a way to do it," Rotor replied.  
  
"And paralysis is a darn sight better than this beacon," Bunnie said, "as horrible a thought as that is." She swallowed, trying to get rid of the lump in her throat. "And *we* won't find a way to do it. Ah'm goin' alone."  
  
Rotor immediately began to protest. Bunnie just reached over with one hand and clamped it over his jaw.  
  
"No, Rotor, this has been waitin' to happen to me for over two years. Griff's right: Ah probably won't even make it as far as the roboticizer chamber. And when Robotnik kills me that's all he's gonna kill. Ah won't let anyone else die because of this. Ah mean it."  
  
***  
  
Nicole's frenzied beeping was nearly impossible to hear over the rushing noise of the wind. Sally had no idea how long she had been trying to get her attention, she only heard the noise when Dulcy paused the frantic beating of her wings to catch a breath. Careful to keep a solid grip on the dragon's back with one hand, she reached down and slid the computer out of its pocket in her boot.  
  
"THE BEACON IS ON THE MOVE." Nicole had to raise her synthesized voice to be heard above the wind.  
  
"Bunnie's moving?" Sonic asked. "Where to?"  
  
"THE DIRECTION OF HER MOVEMENT ALIGNS WITH ROBOTROPOLIS ITSELF," Nicole reported nonchalantly. "SHE IS MOVING AT A FAST AIRSHIP VELOCITY."  
  
"Airship?" Sally asked. It took a moment for the information to sink in. "Wait a second, Nicole. How fast exactly?"  
  
"SPEED AVERAGES EIGHTY KILOMETERS PER HOUR."  
  
"Oh, no..." The wind-ruffled fur on Sally's face did nothing to hide her crestfallen expression.  
  
"What is it, Sal?"  
  
"I was afraid of this. Sonic, our cargo sleds aren't capable of moving faster than forty kph."  
  
"Which means that she's on a different, faster ship," Sonic put the pieces together. "Sal, do think that Robuttnik could've captured her? And he's taking her back to Robotropolis right now?"  
  
Sally couldn't bring herself to answer. She turned back to the portable computer instead. "Nicole, plot intercept coordinates. Something that'll let us catch up with the beacon before it reaches Robotropolis. It might not be too late to save her."  
  
"COORDINATES PLOTTED."  
  
Sally leaned forward, trying to direct her voice into Dulcy's ear. "Dulcy, I want you to change your direction by about sixty-seven degrees to the right."  
  
Dulcy's head craned back. "Huh? Sixty-seven whats?"  
  
Sally pointed in a rough direction. "That way."  
  
"Ok. No problem." The dragon's two passengers had to tighten their grip as Dulcy followed through with the unnecessary acrobatic stunts that accompanied her every motion. Sally imagined for a moment that she heard the laws of physics breaking with a loud *snap*.  
  
"MORE INFORMATION, PRINCESS. FIVE MINUTES AND SEVENTEEN SECONDS AGO I DETECTED AN UNUSUAL SEISMIC DISTURBANCE."  
  
Sally and Sonic exchanged a glance for a moment. Earthquakes had never been known to visit the Great Forest before.  
  
"One of the things my father always said was that there's no such thing as a coincidence. Speculation, Nicole?"  
  
"I HAVE LITTLE DATA," she said, almost apologetically, "SO THERE ARE A NUMBER OF POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS. HOWEVER, THERE IS A CORRELATION BETWEEN ONE OF THE POSSIBILITIES AND THE LAURENTIS BEACON SITUATION."  
  
"Go on," Sally prompted.  
  
"THE SEISMIC DISTURBANCE FITS THE PROFILE FOR A LARGE STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE INSIDE THE LOWER MOBIUS CITY CAVERN."  
  
"Oh my gosh!"  
  
Sonic's head immediately snapped around to face forward. "Double-time it, Dulce!"  
  
***  
  
The Great Forest rolled by beneath the windows of the command ship, moving faster and faster as it reached its peak velocity. It still moved far too slowly for Robotnik's liking. The remaining two squadrons of hover units remained in a tight protective formation around it.  
  
Once, just once, Snively would've liked to see a SWATbot be the bearer of bad news. It seemed like they had formed autonomous self-preservation subroutines in the controlling AI programs, because they only seemed to transmit such data when they were sure that Snively was the one would have to relay it to Robotnik.  
  
He stepped forward, holding a number of hard-copy sensor reports in his hands. "Sir?"  
  
"What is it now, Snively?"  
  
Best to start with the least awful news first, and ease the fat man into it, like a hot tub. "The analysis of the hover units' sensor returns just came back from the Robotropolis mainframe, sir. I'm afraid I have some bad news. It's just like we thought, sir, the city's population did stage a massive evacuation of the cavern just before we arrived. The hover units we had down there picked up the thruster signatures of a large number of aircraft, possibly a convoy. We only needed a few more minutes to trace what direction they went, sir."  
  
Robotnik's lips twisted into a snarl, cheek muscles sending his orange mustache into a ridiculous little dance. Snively didn't dare comment.  
  
"Unfortunately the explosion in the cavern completely scrambled every trace of their departure. We might have been able to track the convoy before, sir, but now... we don't even know the general direction they were headed."  
  
"How many airship thrusters did you detect?"  
  
"Quite a number, sir. Apparently the Freedom Fighters are better equipped than we were led to believe."  
  
"That secret is out, now. Order hover units and scoutships to perform aerial reconnaissance of the Great Forest. Tell them to scan for any signs of thruster exhaust in the atmosphere, and then track it. We must find them."  
  
Snively sighed. "I'm afraid that might not work, sir. We lost over three squadrons of hover units in the cavern collapse. That depleted our forces by an order of magnitude. We simply don't have enough ships left in reserve to provide for an effective sweep."  
  
Robotnik turned around, pacing towards the useless array of sensor arrays on the command ship's bridge. His fist clenched, and swung through the air, punching at an invisible foe. "It always works out like that, doesn't it, Snively? Just when our technology ought to provide us with the greatest possible advantage, it always vanishes. Some flaw, something we missed, something exploited, helps the Freedom Fighters stay alive every time! Why does it happen like that?"  
  
"I really don't know, sir, but there's something else. It's the rabbit."  
  
The sudden ferocity of Robotnik's spin to face Snively made him jump. "*What* about her?"  
  
"We're still tracking the Laurentis beacon, sir, she's still in the Great Forest right now, and heading towards Robotropolis."  
  
"Towards my city? Why is she doing that?" Snively shrugged helplessly. "How soon can we get in mortar cannon range?"  
  
Snively tried to stop the trembling in his knees. "That's just the thing, sir. Even though she emerged further away from Robotropolis than our current position places us, the hover car she's in can still outrun us. That hover sled was built for speed. This command ship wasn't."  
  
"What are you saying?"  
  
"I'm saying that the rabbit will beat us to Robotropolis, sir. We won't be able to get even within mortar cannon range until she's virtually upon the city limits. We might be able to intercept her at the city itself, but only if we plot an immediate great-circle route to get us back and strain the command ship's engines to the breaking point."  
  
Robotnik's fist clenched and unclenched. "Even with the beacon in her leg, the rabbit is free and clear?"  
  
"We can't intercept her, our city's remaining air force is still too distant, and we have no resources along the route she's following. Essentially, we can't stop her until she actually reaches Robotropolis. Unless she turns around and heads directly for us, she's got at least a thirty minutes' respite."  
  
"Damn it! Then plot us that great-circle route, Snively, and get us there!" 


	11. Friends and Family

"Rotor..."  
  
"This is my fight as much as it is yours, and you know it," Rotor said stubbornly. "One of my friends is in danger. I'm a pretty good mechanic; once we recover that blade, I can help you uninstall the nodule."  
  
The hover car flew serenely over the Great Forest, its peacefulness a stark contrast to the tunnel chase of only minutes before. Unfortunately, a dark gray overcast of cumulus clouds had moved in while she and Rotor were underground. Bunnie wondered if she'd ever see the sun again.  
  
It was as if time had rewound backwards to first cargo sled's clearing, just after Drizit had delivered to her the news of the nodule. "Let me help." Bunnie couldn't imagine why Rotor kept asking to travel with her. Before she didn't have the strength to leave him behind, but with all that had happened since, she didn't see much of a choice. That didn't mean it was going to be easy, though. Every word was a throbbing ache.  
  
"Let me come too," Griff interjected. "It's been awhile since I've seen any kind of medical textbook, but I'm more familiar with the nodule's functioning than any person alive right now. Even if we find the blade, I'm also probably the only person who knows what it even looks like. It's the least I can do."  
  
Why couldn't they understand that this wasn't just another raid, another adventure? Following her into the city would get them killed. Dead dead dead. Just like her.  
  
The irritation at Griff's refusal to pilot his own vehicle had faded a long time ago, though. Her own guilt at Lower Mobius's destruction wasn't so fleeting. "The least you can do? Sugar, y'all don't owe me anything. Ah was the one who lost your city."  
  
The hover car began to lose speed and altitude as Bunnie directed it downwards. Her eyes scanned across the treetops, looking for a clearing where she could drop off her two passengers. It was solo time.  
  
Rotor would not give up. "Bunnie, we destroyed the two hover units in the tunnel together. We helped you there. And we can help you in Robotropolis, too."  
  
"Ah don't know if you were payin' attention down in the tunnels, Rotor, but we almost got killed. What makes you think that ol' Lady Luck is gonna favor us again? Ah'm going to Robotropolis because it's the only thing Ah have left to do, even doin' it is probably gonna get me killed." Bunnie took her eyes away from the forest for just a moment, looking into Rotor's soft brown eyes. "Please. It's hard enough as it is. If you're really mah friend, do me a favor and keep livin' and fightin' Robotnik. Ah won't be able to for much longer."  
  
Rotor opened his mouth to say something, and then reluctantly stopped. He sat in dejected silence for a moment before speaking again. "I don't think this is all quite as futile as your making it out to be."  
  
What was the old rule about humor? Some of the funniest things in life were tragic, impossible situations. Bunnie couldn't squash the smirk that formed when she thought of the path that lay ahead of her.  
  
"Yeah, sneakin' into a tyrant's heavily guarded city with a beacon stuck in mah leg, in open daylight in a non-combat-capable luxury hover speeder. All to break into the *roboticizer* chamber itself and steal a tool that for all we know doesn't even exist anymore. Even that does happen somehow, that'll still leave me paralyzed for the rest of mah life. Futile situation mah hinny."  
  
The hover car kept skimming the treetops, waiting for a clearing that hadn't appeared yet. The vegetation in this part of the Great Forest was so thick as to be almost jungle-like. Bunnie gained altitude again, scanning a wider area.  
  
Rotor hung his head in defeat, obviously not having anything left prepared to say. He looked back to Griff, searching for help of any kind. From the silence that followed it was clear that he couldn't think of much either.  
  
"At least let me give you a basic overview of the car's piloting controls," Griff said at last. "You were complaining before about not knowing how to drive this thing."  
  
Bunnie was at once relieved and annoyed that they had actually found a legitimate reason to remain with her for a few minutes. But Griff did have a point. Too many of the controls on the dashboard were foreign to her, and they might come in handy in the maelstrom that was sure to come. She sighed heavily.  
  
"All right, Ah'm listening. But make it quick. Then Ah've got to get you two out of here."  
  
He and Rotor exchanged a thankful glance, then Griff leaned forward. His arm passed over Bunnie's shoulder, occasionally indicating objects on the dashboard as he spoke.  
  
"As far as I've gathered, this machine was manufactured on Nimbus Island around 3215, just before the Acorn Kingdom issued the first of its clean air emissions guidelines. That makes this one of the last few ever built with an internal combustion engine that runs on fossil fuels."  
  
Come to think of it, the engine had sounded a little odd; not at all like the quiet humming of most electrical cells. Bunnie narrowed her eyes, and looked out the car's side windows, trying to see the white flames of the thruster exhaust.  
  
Along the edges of the exhaust flicker, she could see small oily black streams of smoke forming along the edges. The telltale pollution of fossil fuels licked away and up into the atmosphere, joining the thousands of megatons of industrial contaminates released by Robotropolis's factories. When the power cell motor became available, the Acorn Kingdom had good reason to cease production of combustion engines. Disapproval joined the turmoil of emotions in Bunnie's mind.  
  
"I know what you're about to say," Griff said quickly, "so don't. I salvaged this vehicle for a good reason. Even though fossil fuel engines aren't as clean as power cells, they do provide a better acceleration rate. The combustion engine is what lets us outrun Robotnik's power celled hover units. I figured that the speed I'd get from this car made it a worthy tradeoff."  
  
Bunnie didn't make an issue of it. "You said y'all installed the lasers on this car to fight the rat-bot infestation. Did you add anything else combat-wise?"  
  
"Nothing else offensive. But I did install some things that would help protect the car from the rat-bots. A molecular-binding generator has augmented the hull strength of the car. The binding generator dramatically improves the hull's durability with virtually no increase in mass."  
  
She had trouble sorting out Griff's words but understood enough of it. "Uh-huh."  
  
"The generator's probably the only thing that kept us from being smashed to bits the that debris hit us back in the city cavern."  
  
There was finally a break in the thick forest growth, a clearing large enough for the hover car to safely descend into. Bunnie could drop off Rotor and Griff there. They were near enough to Robotropolis; they could probably find their way back to Knothole. She began braking, and directly the hover car into a gentle curve towards the clearing.  
  
"What about detection systems?" Rotor asked.  
  
Griff tapped one of the monitors on the dashboard, and then flicked a nearby switch. The screen came alive, sparkling pinpricks of what looked like white static. "Motion sensor. It has a maximum range of about half a kilometer underground, but above ground I would only trust it to about two hundred or so meters. Wind, treetops, and small animals give it too much interference up here." The small amount of white static on the screen seemed to be the motion sensor picking up the gradual swaying of treetops. He was right, Bunnie saw. It was harder and harder to see through it the distance from the hover car increased. Griff scratched his head. "I'm not sure how much good it'll be to you up here. I've never needed it on the surface. Still, it ought to pick up any large, steady moving masses, like hover units."  
  
Almost as soon as he spoke, a large white dot blinked into existence at the bottom of the screen. Whereas all the interference was randomly scattered and never in one place for long, this dot was bright and steady.  
  
"...the hell is that?" Griff asked.  
  
Without even checking the windows, Bunnie instinctively hit the accelerator. The clearing disappeared behind them, lost in the forest. They would have to wait for another one.  
  
"I don't see anything," Rotor said uncertainly. "Griff?"  
  
"Whatever it is, it's definitely airborne, moving at about the same speed we are. A hundred fifty or sixty meters away." The same aura of expectant determination that had accompanied them like a shadow through the tunnels settled over them once again, disagreements instantly forgotten. Rotor was scanning out the rear windows, while Griff remained fixed on the sensor monitor.  
  
"Robotnik's command ship?" Bunnie asked anxiously. She had expected a little more breathing space since destroying the two hover units in the tunnel, but perhaps that had been a mistake.  
  
Rotor shook his head. "No, Robotnik would never fly unescorted. A scoutship maybe, a lone hover unit... I'm still not seeing anything, Griff."  
  
"It's not directly behind us, it's approaching from our left as well. Maybe a thirty-or-so degree portside inclination."  
  
Keeping a solid grip of the hover car's accelerator and steering handlebars, Bunnie turned around in her seat, joining the visual search. The blip on the sensor monitor was still glowing as bright as ever, and creeping closer. Bunnie was going to have to gun the accelerator if it got any nearer.  
  
Rotor's eyes stopped, and he squinted. His grimace lightened somewhat, almost turning into a smile. Bunnie followed his gaze.  
  
"That's no hover unit," she said bitterly. "Ah almost forgot that this thing would pick up living objects if they're large enough. That's a dragon."  
  
Camouflaged against the greenery of the Great Forest, Bunnie could just make out Dulcy's form. Her wings flapped mightily against the wind, struggling against fatigue to keep up with the speeding hover car. The distance was too great to see if she had any passengers, but Bunnie was sure she knew exactly who'd be with the dragon.  
  
"Sonic and Sally," Rotor said happily. "They found us."  
  
Misery and exhaustion were suddenly indomitable forces. Bunnie felt like laughing and weeping all at once. Not them, too! The more people that got mixed up in this only meant the more people who would be dead when this was all over.  
  
"I don't see how," Griff said.  
  
"They must've picked up the Laurentis beacon, just like Robotnik," Rotor replied. "It didn't take them long to put two and two together. Hey, slow down, Dulcy's having a hard time catching up."  
  
"Wonderful," Bunnie said insincerely. She tapped the accelerator again, the kick of the g-forces solid and reassuring.  
  
"Bunnie, hit the braking thrusters. Let them get in closer so we can hook up and do this together."  
  
"No."  
  
The look on Rotor's face as he worked out the cold equations must've hurt Bunnie at least as much as it did him.  
  
"You're not gonna let them catch up, are you?" he asked quietly. "You're gonna leave them behind."  
  
"Ah was being perfectly serious when Ah said that the fewer people involved in this the better. Now if they die because `a me... Ah can't let that happen."  
  
Anger flared on Rotor's face for the first time. "You can't just do that to-"  
  
A short, clipped beep coming from the dashboard cut him off. A light arrayed near a series of buttons and a speaker grid blinked on and off, suddenly desperate for attention. Bunnie was grateful for the interruption, but not for long. She eyed it cautiously. It was obvious based on its positioning what the light represented, but she asked Griff anyway.  
  
"That's the comm panel," he said at last. "Someone's trying to signal us. My bet's on your friends back there."  
  
Bunnie gave the light a miserable glare.  
  
***  
  
"COMM MODE READY," Nicole reported, "SCRAMBLE CHANNEL OPEN."  
  
Sonic had been the first one to see that airship they were chasing was actually Griff's hover sled. Their relief had lasted only up to the point where they saw that the large-engine speeder was purposely accelerating away from them. The car was slowly gaining more distance on them, and Dulcy had begun complaining of crippling exhaustion.  
  
Maybe whoever was flying the plane just hadn't seen them yet, Sally reasoned to herself. It seemed unlikely, but it there were only two other viable alternatives: Bunnie didn't want them to catch up, or Bunnie wasn't even in control of the vehicle. Neither sat well with her.  
  
Sally quickly checked the display readout on Nicole's monitor. "Lower Mobius hover car LV-426, please pick up."  
  
One of the possibilities vanished as soon as she heard the voice that answered. It was Bunnie's. "Hello, Sally," she said sullenly, voice distorted by ordinary radio cackle but otherwise perfectly clear even through the rushing howl of the wind and the irregular flapping of Dulcy's wings. Nicole's state-of-the-art audio made it sound like Bunnie was sitting right next to her.  
  
"Thank goodness it's you, Bunnie! You have a lot of us worried."  
  
"Y'all aren't the only ones, believe me."  
  
The speed of Dulcy's travel made it dangerous if not impossible to try and turn around, so Sonic was left in the awkward position of facing away from Nicole as he tried to talk to her. He craned his neck back as far as he could. "Yo, Bunnie, you feelin' all right?"  
  
"Not really, sugarhog. Ah really wish Ah didn't have to say this, but it'd be for the best if you'd just turn around right now."  
  
"Huh? Say that again - I don't think I heard you right."  
  
"Bunnie," Sally said, "what's going on over there?"  
  
"What's goin' on is Ah have Ah have a beacon in mah leg screaming my current position to everyone on the planet. Y'all followed me here, you must have detected it. Right?"  
  
"Right. The Laurentis nodule."  
  
There was a pause.  
  
"You know that bit, too," Bunnie's voice said dejectedly.  
  
Sally and Sonic exchanged a quick glance. "Yeah, we know," was all Sally could think of to say.  
  
"Look, then Ah don't have to tell why Ah need to do what's goin' to happen next."  
  
"Hold on, I think there's a couple clearings coming up ahead. Slow down and park in one of them. We can talk more about the nodule on the ground."  
  
"That's just it, Ah can't. Ah'm not slowin' down."  
  
Sally blinked, a task made somewhat difficult by the fact that her eyes were nearly fully closed against the blustering wind. But the expression was instinctive. "What?"  
  
"Ah'm not stoppin'. Y'all can't help me now, nobody but me can help me now. Go back to Knothole. Please."  
  
"Don't blame yourself for not saying anything," Sally said quickly, "We haven't come to arrest you. We're your friends, you know that. Let us help."  
  
"You don't understand. You can't help. Ah'm not trying to leave you behind because Ah'm afraid of you. If you follow me, the odds of you comin' out alive aren't going to be very high. Ah'm doing this as a friend... and that just makes it hurt all the more, Ah guess. But it doesn't mean it's not true."  
  
"And how do you know we can't help? Bunnie, we can try together to remove the nodule. Get rid of it once and for all."  
  
"Sally, sittin' behind me is the inventor of the Laurentis nodule itself. He says that there's no way to uninstall the nodule, except to take it back to the roboticizer chamber. Now if he can't help me, why should you?"  
  
Sally didn't have an answer.  
  
"Like Ah said, Robotnik is trackin' me even now. If Ah stop, he'll just be that much closer to getting. And if you're there when he comes... Sally, Ah couldn't bear to let that happen to you just because of me. Ah'm tryin' to save your life, here. Ah can't stop."  
  
Dulcy was gasping for air now. Even though she hadn't complained yet, the sight of a dragon of her mass wheezing with exhaustion was not something easily ignored. The speed was just too much for her to keep up with for much longer; her wings were already trembling under the effort of the exertion. She couldn't keep up with the hover car for much longer.  
  
Sally held Nicole desperately up to her face, as if holding the speaker closer would somehow make Bunnie understand. "And we can't stop trying to help."  
  
For a long moment, Dulcy's labored breathing and the tremulous rush of the high-altitude winds were the only sounds on the dragon's back. Sonic was staring at Nicole, a horrified expression on his face. Sally guessed that hers must've matched it.  
  
"Ah really, really don't want it to end this way," Bunnie said at last.  
  
"So don't let it. Please slow down, let us catch up. *Please*."  
  
Another pause.  
  
"Goodbye, Sally."  
  
"COMM CHANNEL CLOSED," Nicole reported somberly. 


	12. Prelude to the Confrontation

The sunlight here wasn't as bright as the Great Forest Bunnie had grown up in. The trees' bark was darker, more gnarled, and their leaves were stained a sickly yellow. It was an effect that Bunnie was too familiar with. Smog and chemical pollution had crept away from Robotropolis like a tumor for over a decade, so much so that the effects of industrial waste were visible several kilometers away from the factories that had produced it. The sun itself wore a halo of haze. Inside the city itself, the smog was so bad as to be completely opaque, shrouding its streets in a permanent night.  
  
The change in coloration meant that Dulcy's bright green scaling was easier to pick out against the yellowing forest. A stricken Rotor watched her fall further and further back into distance.  
  
"I can't believe I just heard that," he said.  
  
"Doing the right thing isn't always easy," Griff leaned forward. "It doesn't always feel good, either."  
  
"Doing the right -- the right thing? What the hell do you know about doing the right thing, Laurentis?" Rotor was close to shouting. Bunnie had never seen the quiet mechanic this angry before. She hadn't even thought him capable of raising his voice.  
  
Griff fidgeted; obviously, the shot had hit home. "Bunnie was right," he insisted. "They couldn't have helped. They'd only be unnecessarily risking their lives."  
  
"That doesn't mean we can just leave them behind," he protested. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Griff was supposed to be on his side.  
  
The communications panel started blinking again. Sally was trying to call again. Bunnie made an effort to look away, and tried to ignore it. The light continued to sadly flash on and off, abandoned. "And why not?" she asked. "If Ah tried to cut mah wrists right now, Rotor, would you try and stop me?"  
  
"Of course!"  
  
"Good. So we're agreed that we're not in the business of assisted suicide."  
  
"That's completely diff-"  
  
"Rotor, think clearly for me here. What are our odds of getting through Robotropolis' defensive grid?"  
  
Rotor took a deep, slow breath, unwilling to be drawn off into a tanget.  
  
"Come on, Rotor."  
  
"Not very high," he admitted. There was no question about who controlled Robotropolis's airspace. There were at least fifty hover units on standby at all times, with more available with advance warning -- and with the Laurentis nodule's beacon, they had that warning. That alone would be enough to extinguish them, and that was discounting the numerous anti-aircraft guns and guardian turrets. Robotnik's air superiority was one reason why the Freedom Fighters' missions were strictly limited to ground assaults.  
  
"Now what are the odds of not one, but two high-profile targets making it intact through that same defensive grid?" she asked.  
  
Rotor was understandably reluctant. "Smaller by an order of magnitude."  
  
"So the fewer of us there are, the better our chances of actually pullin' this off are, right?" It was rule number one of covert fighting. Princess Sally herself had quoted this more than once.  
  
Bunnie kept asking questions that Rotor didn't want to answer. Hell, Bunnie thought, she didn't even want to be asking them herself. But she had to keep leading him on to make him understand. "If Sonic, Sally, and Dulcy aren't around when the fireworks start, they'll live through this no matter what happens to us. Right?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"But they most likely won't if we try to breach Robotropolis security together." Bunnie waited until Rotor had acknowledged that before moving on to the most difficult question. Bunnie just wasn't used to talking about things like suicide so bluntly, but her ordinary sensitivities had been smashed to pieces ever since she had heard Drizit's message. "Just like if Ah were to cut mah wrists, the odds of me surviving if you didn't intervene wouldn't be very good."  
  
Rotor just nodded a silent affirmative. He was unable to speak, his anger had disappeared, replaced by a concealing mask.  
  
"The odds of our friends surviving if we wait up for them are going to be just as low, Rotor."  
  
He opened his mouth again, but didn't say anything. He looked incredibly pathetic for a moment, like there was nothing he could think of to say to that. Instead, he just closed his mouth and folded his arms up on the dashboard. Phantom tears glistened in his eyes as he hid his head in his them.  
  
Bunnie felt instantly sorry for him. She knew how pain like that felt. Two years ago, she had known what the right course of action was but hadn't taken it because she couldn't bear to do it. Rotor was confronting the same demon. Every gram of logic, every cold, hard formula Bunnie ran through her head told her that leaving her friends behind, to save their lives, was the right course of action.  
  
If only logic didn't hurt so much.  
  
Griff was silent as he watched the exchange. He wished himself very, very small.  
  
"Well, Ah always try to be the one who looks on the bright side," Bunnie said after a quiet moment. "Ah can't slow down and drop you off, now, not with Dulcy following behind us. They're keepin' me from parking. You get your wish after all, Rotor. Looks like you and Griff are comin' with me to Robotropolis."  
  
Neither she, Griff, or Rotor spoke much during the next few minutes.  
  
Bunnie watched Robotropolis's skyscrapers grow larger on the horizon. Their slim strands widened as the distance between them narrowed, and the smog became worse. The sun was no longer a distinct ball in the sky, but rather only a patch of yellow light amidst the pollution. She wondered if she had seen the sun for the last time in her life. The land was falling into a pallid shadow, now. There were only a few fully grown trees here, now, the majority of the forest had been reduced to scraggly bushes. The proud old-growth trees that had so characterized Mobotropolis in ages past had been either been destroyed by industrial contaminates, or by Robotnik's massive warship during the coup.  
  
Bunnie kept herself busy by monitoring the air ahead, and the motion detector screen on the dashboard below. Aside from the static surrounding the edges of the screen, there were no detectable blips. Several times Bunnie had turned to investigate phantoms appearing on the sensor, but they were just treetops throwing off the detector. At least the interference was leveling out as the trees themselves reduced in number.  
  
Thankfully, it was smooth sailing as they closed on the city. Bunnie was determined to enjoy it while she could. It might be the last quiet moment of her life.  
  
She was somewhat disappointed when a second light on the communication panel despoiled the silence. She stared at it. "Griff, what's that?  
  
"It's not your friends signaling us this time. Someone else wants to talk."  
  
"But who?" An answer came to Bunnie almost as soon as she had asked the question -- Robotnik.  
  
"I'm not sure. Pick it up and check."  
  
She reached down and activated the communications panel, half- expecting to hear Robotnik's sonorous voice grate out of the speakers. A tremble of relief rippled down her shoulders when she heard the cautious, "You there, Griff?" on the other end. She wasn't the only one.  
  
"Dirk!" Griff exclaimed, immediately leaning forward until his head poked through the gap between the two front seats. "You made it!"  
  
"Yes, we made it. I'm sitting here at the rendezvous point with the rest of the convoy now. The sunlight up here's really something - it's been too long since I've seen the Great Forest."  
  
"You shouldn't even be calling me now. Not even on a scramble channel. You might be traced."  
  
"It's a risk I had to take," the boar answered. Bunnie found herself wishing she could see his expression. The metal grid of the speakers was just too dead to look at. "The convoy's just finishing flight prepping for another trip out to our safe zone in the Great Unknown right now, so if we are being traced, we'll be long gone before any hover units actually get out here. I just… had to check and see if you were all right."  
  
"I'm fine. Don't worry about me. What about you? Is everything okay?"  
  
"I've got some good news on that end, Griff. Everybody in the city made it. Everybody. All one hundred and fifty heads are accounted for, including the militia soldiers and the newcomers group I lead this morning. We didn't lose anybody when we left the city."  
  
Bunnie stared at the panel, wide-eyed. "E-Everybody?" she stuttered. That couldn't be right, could it? It would be too good to be true. There were so many people there, some of them had to have been too far away from the convoy. After all, it was only just blind luck that she managed to find-  
  
"Yes, Bunnie, everybody," Dirk said. "That reminds me: Gail told me to thank you. Thaddeus regained consciousness a little while ago. It looks like he's going to recover quite nicely.  
  
The words couldn't come to her lips. Ever since seeing - feeling - the city's energy crystal explode behind her she'd been chased by the sinking of knowing that your nightmare is not just about to come true, but *had* come true. Past, immutable, and unchangeable. She couldn't bring herself to believe that people down below hadn't died in the blast.  
  
One aspect of her nightmare would never come true now. Robotnik had used the nodule to find one of the Freedom Fighters' hideaways, that much was true. But nobody had died because of her. *Nobody*.  
  
Knowing that was even a greater boost to her morale than seeing the flaming wreckage of the two hover units in the tunnel behind her. The nightmare could be defeated. A wide grin cracked across her face, feeling foreign and alien, but there nonetheless.  
  
"Who's Gail?" Griff asked.  
  
"Somebody who's safe," Bunnie said. "That's all that matters."  
  
"Then never mind, I guess," he gave up. "Dirk, get out to the Great Unknown right now. I'll try and join you later, but no promises."  
  
"Right. What about you? Where are you headed?"  
  
"Robotnik's city. Please, do all of us a favor and just don't ask."  
  
"Sure. I trust you, Griff. I'll see you out at our safe zone. The people of Lower Mobius need you."  
  
"Goodbye, Dirk."  
  
The comm panel clicked off.  
  
"Now the only problem is gettin' to Robotropolis," Bunnie said.  
  
"That's not going to be easy," Rotor said. "Robotnik's had plenty of warning, and the city's pretty heavily guarded."  
  
"Anyone ever tell ya you have a gift for understatement, Rote?"  
  
"Never. Griff, how long do you think we have until we get there?"  
  
"I'd say only five minutes."  
  
***  
  
The severity of the attack being prepared would have shocked even Bunnie, who thought that she was prepared for anything.  
  
Sensor stations had detected the hover car emerging from the pipeline tunnel in an instant, their observations added by orders from Robotnik's command ship to focus all of the supremely sensitive measuring equipment on that area. It was almost unnecessary; even without the aid of the Laurentis nodule's beacon, the city's radar would've been able to pinpoint the car's location as soon as it gained over twenty-five meters in altitude.  
  
As she spoke her last words, all twelve radar stations in the city itself were beaming active radar pulses off the car, as were countless dozens of other more remote stations scattered across the Great Forest and Robotropolis's suburbs. The hover car's location was pinpointed to within a square centimeter for every second of its journey. Heat sensors not blinded by the car's two burning thruster exhaust ports had detected three furries inside, and had charted their species. Mass sensors constantly pulsed against the hull, measuring density, fuel remaining, general ship layout, and the weight of those inside. The electromagnetic spectrum around the car had been analyzed, finding two small laser barrels and a motion scanning system inside the car. Had Robotnik asked, the city's AI could've guesstimated the color of Bunnie's eyes, or what tools Rotor carried in his utility belt.  
  
As soon as Robotnik gave the word, local AI routines scrambled the city's defense force.  
  
SWATbots all around the city had their duties rotated prematurely as hundreds at a time were ordered to the hover unit hangar. The AI played a game of three-dimensional chess with the duty rosters and layouts that would've overwhelmed an organic mind, rotating SWATbots with ordinary worker bots as more and more were pulled to defensive duties.  
  
The hangar bays had been depleted when Robotnik's assault force left, eliminating the overcrowding problem and making getting the remaining hover units up into the air was less of a hassle than usual. Ten hover units, pilot-copilot SWATbot pairs in place, launched at time until the air was buzzing with them, and they swarmed like insects. The sound of laser turrets charging became an audible, inescapable whine. Half of them assumed static defensive formations, while the other half followed the local AI's plotted intercept points, converging at once on the hover car's flight path. They spread outward like a barely controlled explosion, and still more continued to launch as the AI ordered more SWATbot pilots ready.  
  
Klaxons rang shrilly throughout smaller, more clandestine hangar bays dug below rock shelves underneath Robotropolis itself. The alarms themselves were loud enough to severely irritate organic eardrums, had any been around to hear them. Doors on the surface slid quietly open as the wedge-shaped Stealthbots were raised to launching platforms. Missiles were stocked in their bays, and they were given target profiles. There weren't as many Stealthbots in the air as there were ordinary hover units, but the Stealthbots were supremely powerful. Only they could actually match the speed of the hover car, and their deadly missiles were capable of accelerating to over three times the car's speed. Each Stealthbot was given only one order: destroy the hover car by any means necessary.  
  
Gun turrets and anti-air defenses charged, and ammunition was delivered and restocked. AA batteries were positioned strategically around the city, and local AI routines even had time to set up more along the hover car's anticipated flight path. Massive barrels rotated and warmed as they prepared to spew out kilogram after kilogram of lead pellets into the air. The turrets were only a complement to the real ground defenses, however: the flak guns. At a moment's notice, explosive metal shards would fill the air.  
  
Robotnik wanted the rabbit dead, dead, dead. The controlling AI, a near-sentient array of computer networks, didn't doubt that for a second. He had raised overkill to almost an art form.  
  
The overall security set-up of the defensive coordination subroutines had the exact same flair for overindulgence as the rest of Robotropolis' aerial defenses. The AI itself was encased in military-grade hardware capable of withstanding an EMP blast, and located decentrally throughout the city. Its programming was triple-encrypted and then triple-encrypted again, just for good measure, while its actual transmissions had even more protection. The stringent security measures even reached the point where they slowed down the AI's thought processes, but it hardly seemed to matter when the AI was capable of scrambling the entire city in less than a hundredth of a second anyway.  
  
Snively had told Robotnik on several occasions that the security locks on their defensive systems were completely unbreakable, and absolutely foolproof. It would have distressed them both a great deal had they learned that a hedgehog Freedom Fighter was right now busy disassembling the AI's core thought processes.  
  
***  
  
Unearthly green light from the lone computer monitor glinted off Uncle Chuck's metallic skin in the poor lighting of his trash heap hideout. He resisted the temptation to blink against the lack of light. His pupils were metallic, and couldn't dilate, but he still retained a great many instincts from his days as an organic being. Artificial Intelligence theory wasn't typically his specialty, but in the course of his work as the Freedom Fighters' spy he'd picked up more than enough experience to be considered an expert. Just by looking at the code he could picture how the defensive computer's various subroutines interacted with each other. More importantly, he knew how to control them.  
  
He picked up the small radio, eyes still on the text scrolling across his screen. "Okay, Sally, I'm in. What do you what?"  
  
"Well, what can you do?"  
  
"I can do anything except disable Robotnik's defense network entirely. I won't be able to stay in the system for long without being detected if I do something drastic, though. Name it."  
  
"Okay, two things," Sally answered after a pause. "There are two objects approaching Robotropolis right now. One is a Lower Mobius hover car, and it should be the focus of Robotnik's defensive coordination. I want you to make it easier for them to get in."  
  
"I'm on it, Sal." He was still angry with himself for missing Robotnik's recent search for the Laurentis nodule. Charles's spy sensor coverage of the city was no where near complete, and when the fat tyrant really wanted to, he could even avoid them long enough to keep such an endeavor hidden. But he was determined to make up for his earlier failure by providing all the help he was worth right now. His fingers hit the keyboard in such a flurry that they threatened to damage the sensitive keys. "I won't be able to call off the attackers completely, not without Robotnik noticing, but I can at least keep a lot of the buggers confused."  
  
"Good. The second object is Dulcy, and she's carrying Sonic and myself. Does Robotnik seem to be preparing for us?"  
  
Charles checked his displays, barely allowing his typing to slow. "No, as far as I can tell, he hasn't even noticed Dulcy."  
  
"See to it that he doesn't."  
  
That didn't require as much effort as the first task. Five seconds later, he said, "Okay. The defense network now thinks that Dulcy is an ordinary hover unit. You have a threat profile of zero in their databanks. You're in the clear. I can't say the same thing about Bunnie or Rotor, since Robotnik would definitely notice if I did that for them, but at least you'll be able to follow them in safely."  
  
"Thank you, Sir Charles. Truly."  
  
**I should've been there to warn you about the transmitter** Charles thought sourly. But he didn't say it, only typed faster and faster.  
  
"What's Bunnie's ETA?" Sally asked.  
  
"Looks like they'll be on the city in exactly five minutes. Good luck."  
  
***  
  
Snively watched as Robotropolis's defensive grid solidified on the master tactical display. It was like watching water freeze into ice, or - he thought as Robotnik stepped up behind him - grease congeal. Dozens upon dozens of hover units attained stationary coordinates and began waiting for the rabbit to approach. Still more were racing out to meet her, and the command ship itself was coming up towards the rabbit's hover car from behind.  
  
Snively's shoulders still ached from the impact against the bridge's wall, when Robotnik slammed him against it. Still more metaphors came to mind as he watched the display, all of them uncomplimentary to Robotnik. Like an egg forming a shell, he thought.  
  
"Saturation grid ready," he reported, snapping himself out of it as the last dot fell into place. "Sir, need I point out, that with the SWATbot AI set to more aggressive, the buildings below *will* suffer damage…"  
  
"I know, Snively," Robotnik snapped. "Keep them ready for a laser saturation regardless."  
  
"Yes, sir."  
  
Robotnik continued to pace up and down the length of the command ship's bridge. He wasn't stopping to gloat. He wasn't stopping to reassure himself with shallow egotism, no, "She doesn't stand a chance!" this time. Defeat had hardened him, set his resolve even more than the largest victory could. He was committed to see the rabbit either die, or be roboticized. Snively would hate to be her right now. "What kind of tricks could she try? What would elude my defensive grid? They always find a way."  
  
Snively considered it for a moment, thinking of every tactical lesson he had ever had the computer give him. Statistics and wild opportunities raced through his mind. "The hover car can outrace the hover units themselves, sir, that's why we're keeping them on stationary standby. The Stealthbots should be able to match her speed... but we don't have enough time to reprogram their weapons systems to lock their missiles onto the Laurentis beacon itself. The Stealthbots will have to rely on ordinary radar detectors for the time being, and it's possible that the hover car could scramble that."  
  
"How?" Robotnik asked quickly.  
  
"The rabbit could reduce her altitude to less than twenty meters. Radar would have a difficult time locking on that close to the ground. They could maybe evade our missiles."  
  
"I don't like that, Snively."  
  
"But, with the rabbit closer to the ground, they'll just be that much more vulnerable to the command ship's mortar cannons, sir. It's the debris and shrapnel from nearby impacts, it'll catch them twice as hard. They can't possibly know about the mortar cannons, so it'll catch them completely by surprise." Snively kept working it out in his head. "If they raise altitude to evade the mortar cannons, they'll be vulnerable to the Steathbot's missiles."  
  
"Get ready for it, then. Snively, back in the tunnel system, you reported that it looked like the hover car was using some kind of motion tracking sensors, correct?"  
  
Snively would've hated to correct Robotnik, not while he was in this mood. Fortunately, he was dead right this time. "She is, yes, sir. And we can take advantage of that."  
  
"Prepare a... suitable ambush."  
  
A slight smile crossed Snively's lips. "Yes, sir."  
  
"What about the mortar cannons themselves? Are they ready?"  
  
"Charged and ready. Fire control standing by."  
  
"Excellent. When will we be in range to use them?"  
  
Snively checked a nearby chronometer, and quickly compared it to the master tactical display. "Almost as soon as the rabbit hits the hover unit defensive grid, sir. In exactly five minutes -- mark."  
  
***  
  
Ever since they had first seen it, when they were seven, the Freedom Fighters called it the firebreak. It was where Robotropolis hadn't quite begun, the suburbs were nowhere in sight, and the Great Forest had already ended. It was a stretch of dead, barren, scorched brown dirt. Nothing could ever grow there again.  
  
Robotnik had grown tired of various guerilla groups using the thick forest as cover when they approached his city. No matter how hard he tried, his sensors couldn't penetrate the growth. It was the perfect shelter from airborne hover units and low-flying camera orbs. Visibility was rarely more then twenty meters, and even infrared was useless. His enemies, even the Freedom Fighters at that young age, had taken full advantage of it.  
  
So Robotnik did what only Robotnik could do. With laser blast after laser blast, he razed a full kilometer of the forest, in a ring around Robotropolis. He burned it until it was nothing more than smoldering wood and dead wildlife. Then he irradiated the soil itself, poisoning it to prevent any future plant growth. Years and years of erosion had reduced it to little more than a barren waste.  
  
It was where Robotnik's defense forces had all the advantage, where there were no forest to hide obstacles on the ground, or, more significantly, to provide cover for hover sleds approaching by air.  
  
It was coming up far too fast.  
  
"Well, Griff, wut do you suggest we do?"  
  
Griff leaned forward to examine the motion sensor display. There wasn't as much static crackle from treetops now that they were approaching the firebreak, but there was still some interference. The motion tracker would be good up to three hundred meters now, he estimated. They would have a better chance of spotting something by eye, and Rotor had that angle covered. But neither sensor nor naked eye gave them any overt sign of anything approaching them.  
  
"Well, it's still going to be a difficult battle no matter what we do," he said cautiously, "but I think there's some things we can do to force the odds in our favor. Rotor, correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the Stealthbots have hard-wired ROM programming, to reduce computer core weight."  
  
"That's right," Rotor said, eyes scanning back and forth across the firebreak.  
  
"So Robotnik won't be able to reprogram their missiles to target the Lau..." Griff stumbled on the name, "...the nodule's beacon. They'll have to rely on standard radar to fire on us. And firebreak or no firebreak, we can still make it hard on them if we keep a low altitude."  
  
"Gotcha," Bunnie said.  
  
"Low altitude is key. Stealthbot missiles will still be a problem, and so will anti-aircraft batteries, but their effectiveness will be drastically reduced if we're low enough. The fact is," Griff said confidently, "Robotnik doesn't really have a weapon that's very efficient that close to the ground."  
  
"That's good. Will it be good enough to protect us for over a kilometer of the firebreak?"  
  
"Probably not. But the difficult part won't even be getting past the firebreak. We still have to slow down to a landing near the castle, since that's where Robotnik keeps the roboticizer. We're going to be really vulnerable there. Not to mention breaking into the room itself. Our only advantage then is that'll be the last place that Robotnik expects to go. Maybe if we caught them by surprise… but, too late for that now."  
  
"Let's worry 'bout gettin' past the firebreak, first," Bunnie said. "If we're still alive then, we'll see wut happens next."  
  
The forest, already yellow and scraggly this close to the city, lost whatever questionable vitality it had left to decade-old laser scars and radiation burns. The firebreak loomed less than a minute's worth of travel ahead.  
  
This was it.  
  
The stakes weren't quite as high as they had been at the beginning of this endeavor. There were no civilian lives left at stake. Though Sonic, Sally, and Dulcy were still behind them they were arrive too late to be caught in the battle. The only thing left up to ante was Griff, Rotor, and herself.  
  
And if need be, she thought, carefully not making an expression as she looked at the dashboard controls, just herself.  
  
She could handle that.  
  
"Rotor, if you get through this and Ah don't - just tell everyone that Ah'm sorry. Ah'm sorry for what almost happened, and it was one of the biggest mistakes of mah life not to tell them. None of them deserved wut almost happened. Tell them that they're the best people Ah've ever known."  
  
Rotor took his mournful eyes away from the firebreak. "Bunnie, either both of us make it or none of us. You know that."  
  
"Right."  
  
Silence.  
  
"Firebreak's coming up," Griff pointed out. "The motion tracker isn't picking anything up yet, but now would be a good time to start losing that altitude. We're going to hit them any instant."  
  
"We get through fast and hard, Bunnie. We're going to make it." He held out his fist, holding it steady in the middle of the passenger compartment. Griff, an inadvertent part of the mission, but a part of it all the same, held his own hand underneath Rotor's. It had been a long time since he had been taught the handshake, and he had only ever gotten a few chances to use it, but it was solidly rooted in his memory all the same.  
  
"Yep," Bunnie said sadly, staring at the egg-shaped silhouette of Robotnik's castle. "One way or another, we're going to make it there." Nonetheless, she put her own organic fist on top of Rotor's.  
  
Their fingers danced as they performed the Freedom Fighter's sacred ritual.  
  
"Let's do it to it."  
  
Bunnie pushed the steering column downward, and felt gravity decline in response as the car dipped down lower to the ground. The reminder of the forest grew closer, and sped by faster. When the firebreak actually began, they were only thirty meters above the racing valleys of blackened dirt and mud.  
  
***  
  
"Sir," Snively said instinctively the moment the tactical display began to change. "I was right. The rabbit's reducing altitude."  
  
"Excellent."  
  
"Keep in mind, sir," he said as respectfully as possible, "that *will* foul the Stealthbots' missile guidance."  
  
"And leave her all the more vulnerable to the mortar cannons."  
  
"Aye, sir. We're approaching firing range momentarily. All hover units and Stealthbots in position for the ambush. The rabbit's motion sensor has picked up nothing so far, I guarantee it. We're ready to launch our attack… as soon as you give the word, sir."  
  
Dots on the tactical display continued to track forward in the anticipatory silence of the command center. 


	13. Shooting Solution

The engines continued to roar full strength behind the hover car, trailing tumultuous streams of white-hot exhaust. Bunnie leveled their descent. Gravity shoved her downward into the seat's thick cushioning as she pulled the steering column upwards. Slowly, the horizon began to straighten. The craggy surface of the firebreak rushed past only meters below. She was worried that she hadn't begun to pull up in time, and let out a sigh of relief as they reached a stable altitude.  
  
Bunnie gave the firebreak a quick visual appraisal. There were no anti-aircraft guns installed anywhere so far from the city, so she didn't have to worry about that yet. No visible signs of approaching hover units, which was odd. They should be out here by now.  
  
She frowned, and checked the dashboard controls. Speed was holding at a steady eighty-two kilometers per hour, varying slightly because of their descent. The fuel tanks were full enough to take them another four hundred kilometers. There was still nothing besides static crackle on the motion sensor array. She stared at the display for a moment, and just then a foreboding thought struck her.  
  
"Griff," she asked, "How exactly does this motion sensor work?"  
  
He scratched his head while digging the facts out of his head. "Uh, a high frequency radio, I think. Works a lot like radar or sonar: it sends out a pulse, reads the echo, sends out another, and finds out what's been moving. There are a whole lot of things it needs to do between, compensating for the motion of the car-"  
  
Bunnie didn't hear anything past the second sentence. She wasn't an expert in sensor technology, but any Freedom Fighter had to learn from their first mission how to remain undetected. And what Griff had just said was a big no-no.  
  
"Y'all mean *active* sensors?" she asked, not bothering to clamp down on the alarm in her voice. "Something that Robotnik could've detected earlier?"  
  
"Oh, no," Rotor said under his breath. "If he knows that we're using motion sensors, he'll have prepared a trap."  
  
***  
  
"Let the chase begin," Robotnik said, signaling his waiting forces into action.  
  
***  
  
The motion sensor burst into animation.  
  
The four ambush Stealthbots fired their full complement of acceleration thrusters, and burst away from their shielding landing positions. Bright engine exhaust vaporized the parched dirt of the firebreak as it hurtled them into the air, matching the hover car's speed in seconds and continuing to gain ground. They had been lying dormant on the ground, waiting silently - more importantly, motionlessly - as their prey passed unsuspectingly overhead. Only when they had achieved a strategically valuable position had they dared reveal themselves to the motion sensor. But by then, it was too late for the hover car to avoid them.  
  
Four missiles immediately careened away from Stealthbot weapons receptacles, each hurling themselves towards the hover car.  
  
Bunnie jerked the steering column over to the left the instant the motion sensor revealed the four Stealthbots coming to life behind them. The seatbelt strained against her as the gee-forces hit. Rotor tried to shout something, but it was lost to the thunder of the directional thrusters firing and the sharp crack of waylaid missiles detonating. The air behind them turned into a solid sheet of yellow as the missiles impacted the firebreak floor. That had only been the first salvo.  
  
"Y'all sure ya wanted to tag along?" she shouted at Rotor, knowing that he wouldn't be able to hear her. A lateral twist to the steering column, and the hover car tilted to the right. The ground slanted itself at a forty- five degree angle, but the maneuver never shook a single one of their pursuers. It would never be that easy.  
  
Another four specks raced away from the trailing Stealthbots as they launched a second barrage. Fire blossomed in Bunnie's rear-view mirror as they detonated, the ribbon of flame rippling threateningly close to the twin engines. Something shiny and fast *whipped* past the passenger compartment. They must have had a shrapnel payload, Bunnie thought. Air currents distorted by its passage buffeted her window. It would be just like Robotnik to go for something so intensely destructive.  
  
As if the cacophony of explosions and roaring engines weren't enough for her to cope with, the motion sensor was screaming alarms as it registered what lay just ahead. She could spare only a moment's glance at the dashboard, and resisted the impulse to do a double take.  
  
No, that couldn't be right.  
  
The Stealthbots had stopped firing in tandem now, and were just launching their weapons one at a time. Missiles continuously detonated on the firebreak just behind them, shrapnel sending chunks of debris hurtling through the air at terminal velocity. To compensate for the ground's dehabilitating influence on their guidance systems, the pilots were just firing missiles directly at the ground now, and were waiting for the inevitable lucky strike. To avoid one of their random assaults, Bunnie had to push the hover car slightly upwards. Calculations poured through her mind: she couldn't rise high enough to let the Stealthbots establish a solid radar lock, just enough to avoid being pelted by one of the missiles.  
  
When she pushed upwards, the hover car sped over the pinnacle of a small dirt uprising, giving its passengers a direct view of what lay ahead. It only confirmed what the motion tracker had registered moments earlier.  
  
The air buzzed with hover units. Over fifty of them bore mercilessly down on the car. Stealthbots swarmed in waiting circles, like vultures. The ordinarily quiet whine of laser cannons being charged could be heard even from this distance, simply because there were so many of them. The city's military forces had coalesced into a cloud of teeming mites, dark enough to rival even the permanent smog haze of the city. It was the second time in one day that she had encountered more hover units than she had ever seen in her life. Records like that shouldn't be broken between a couple hours, she thought sadly. The firebreak still continued for another seven hundred meters before melting into the steel walls and waiting anti-aircraft guns of the city.  
  
This time they really weren't going to make it.  
  
Rotor stared at the defense forces in slack-jawed disbelief. Griff was invisible to Bunnie, but completely silent.  
  
"All this," Bunnie whispered incredulously, "just for me?"  
  
***  
  
Neither passengers nor driver could know it, but the pursuit of the car wasn't going exactly as planned. Too many hover units were racing away from their assigned positions with no order or provocation, and the local defense net was screaming erroneous reports. Depending on which sensor display Snively looked at, there was either nothing in the air over Robotropolis, or two hundred yellow luxury cars were descending en masse on the city. Only the master tactical display, with its direct uplink the command ship's own sensor net, remained uncorrupted.  
  
"It's happening again, isn't it, Snively?" Robotnik asked, a dangerous growl in his voice.  
  
"I'm not sure!" Snively pounded at the bridge controls, to no avail. He had lost communications with over half the defense force. Many hover units had just frozen in place. Others were taking pot shots at each other, and at least four were busy playing some demented game of hide-and-go-seek through the city streets and alleyways. "I think the defense AI's suffering some kind of glitch."  
  
"It's never a glitch. Not where the Freedom Fighters are concerned."  
  
Only Snively's greatest efforts allowed him to retain control over the remaining hover units. Thinking quickly, he wiped the defensive AI off computer memory entirely. It would take weeks to rebuild, but it was already hopelessly corrupted anyway. And wiping the AI let him place the remaining hover units under the direct control of the command ship's tactical computers. In normal circumstances, the Robotropolis defense AI would've been infinitely more effective. Now, though, anything would perform better than that trashed software.  
  
Snively typed in the final orders. The deletion was complete. In the end, he had retained control over half of the original squadron. It was still more than enough to maintain a healthy degree of overkill in chasing the rabbit.  
  
He shook his head in disbelief when he saw that the majority of those he had lost control had suddenly switched course, and were attacking the ones left under his command. He had to assign a great deal of the reminder to fending them off.  
  
In the end, though, whoever was behind this glitch could only delay the pursuit, never stop it entirely. They would get the hover car yet, Snively knew. The air around the rabbit's car was constantly alight with explosions. And no one had dared try and take the command ship's secret weapon off-line.  
  
That reminded him...  
  
"We're in mortar cannon range now, sir," Snively reported as soon as the timer on the console in front of him finished counting down to zero. "Establishing a target lock, and getting ready for a shooting solution. Just one more minute."  
  
***  
  
It was like charging into a solid wall.  
  
The only thing Bunnie heard after Rotor shouted, "Get us down!" was the solid, uninterrupted thunder of dozens upon dozens of laser cannons discharging at once. The hover car plunged through a sheet of vivid green energy and a curtain of debris. The shots seemed almost random in aim, but there were so many of them that the odds of not getting hit by several of them were so low as to be virtually nil. It was only by the sheerest of luck that the hover car only got lanced through once as it passed through the storm.  
  
Hull plating buckled and burned as the laser beam struck home. The molecular-binding generator struggled to compensate for the force of the blow, while the conductive armor did its best to dissipate the energy. Neither could do much against the overwhelming power of the hover unit laser. Within milliseconds of the strike, the binding-generator was forced to shut down, and declare that part of the car lost. Its controlling processor concentrated on trying to reinforce the surrounding areas.  
  
The laser had clipped the side of the ship, just at the far right corner of the passenger compartment. Glass shattered at the beam's exit point -- it had passed through one of the rear windows. Most of the fragments were projected outwards, where they fell harmlessly to the firebreak just meters below, but a significant fraction of the sharp glass was blown inside.  
  
The force of the blast tilted the hover car sharply upwards, barely leaving Bunnie enough time to counteract it. She threw the steering column downward. The wind was rushing through the hole in the passenger compartment, creating a buffeting noise that almost - but not quite - managed to drown out the sounds of the laser fire. Then debris was sprinkling throughout the cabin, fragments moving fast enough to embed themselves into upholstery, fur, or skin. Several sharp things stung Bunnie's ears, white-hot glass remnants projected inwards from the point of impact. Rotor's head bucked forward involuntarily, and his hand came around to slap at where the glass shards had nipped that back of his head. Both of them were unhurt, but...  
  
"Griff!"  
  
Bunnie couldn't hear her own words. She tried to glance backwards. The rear right window had been completely broken by the laser, and the rear seat had taken the worst share of the shrapnel.  
  
The mountain goat was slumped forward into his seatbelt, his face invisible from Bunnie's angle. Opaque red blood trailed down the nape of his neck from a gash she couldn't see, the sharp color a severe contrast to his soft tan fur. He didn't move, and, in the chaos of the chase, Bunnie couldn't tell if he was breathing.  
  
When she took horrified eyes away from the sight, she just had enough time to throw the steering column sharply to the right to avoid another Stealthbot missile volley.  
  
***  
  
Dulcy had "cracked the whip" so many times that it hurt to even move her tail. Sally was sure that the adolescent dragon had exerted herself beyond her ordinary breaking point, and it still wasn't fast enough. They wouldn't be at the firebreak in time to help, even though they could see it now. She was using Nicole to watch the fight, her computer's optical scanners acting like a telescope and projecting a view of the chase in the air in front of her.  
  
Sally gasped as she saw a part of the hover car's rear passenger compartment smashed to pieces by an errant laser blast. Sir Charles had been doing his part by scrambling their aiming processors, but with that many weapons, a lucky shot had been bound to get through sooner or later.  
  
She held her hand clasped over her mouth as the hover car began to spin out of control, and couldn't hide her relief when she saw it right itself again. The car twisted sharply to the left to avoid a concussive volley of missiles. "If they stay low enough," Sally told herself, not quite believing it, "they just might make it."  
  
"UNKNOWN VARIABLE ENTERING THE EQUATION, SALLY," Nicole interrupted unapologetically.  
  
"Show me," Sally said.  
  
The hologram flickered and changed shape. The shape of the object at the center of the new view was bulb-shaped, visually intimidating, and unmistakable.  
  
"Robuttnik's command ship," Sonic said, watching the hologram as best he could from his angle.  
  
Sally frowned, and risked taking one of her hands off of the speeding dragon's back. She pointed at a peculiar formation of weapon barrels mounted on the underside of the ship. "That's not right. We've never seen those before. Nicole, identify that."  
  
"THAT SYSTEM IS NOT A PART OF THE ORIGINAL COMMAND SHIP SCHEMATICS," Nicole reported, pausing a moment to check her data library. "THEREFORE IT IS OF RECENT INSTALLATION."  
  
Sally examined the shape and size of the weapons barrels. They were too long to be standard close-range armaments. The focusing crystal at the peak of the barrel was slim, and tapered to a thin point. Sally was familiar with basic laser weapon mechanics, it had been one of the first things she had taught herself as soon as she began fighting Robotnik. The longer a barrel was, she recalled, and the more slender the focusing crystal, the longer the range of the weapon. But she had never seen an example quite as severe as that. Longer range...  
  
It didn't take her very long to figure it out.  
  
Sally's heart fluttered for a moment, and this time it wasn't because of Dulcy's erratic flying. "Oh, no!" she cried.  
  
***  
  
Robotnik's fingers hovered over the mortar cannon controls, twitching occasionally. "Charge the forward cannon battery, five-one-two gigawatt payload," he instructed. "Heat dissipation and thermal vent maximum readiness. Since the city defense can't seem to handle the rabbit, we'll kill her ourselves."  
  
"Targeting lock acquired, sir," Snively said as he carried out the tyrant's commands. "We just need to obtain a shooting solution."  
  
"Snively, as a precaution, cut the command ship off from Robotropolis's data network. We can't let whatever is going wrong there affect us. This *will* work."  
  
"We're already completely isolated. Mortar cannon controls are routed directly to your console." Snively checked his monitor. The SWATbots below had fetched the requisite battery. With the firm press of a button, and a final, deep tone, the charge was loaded. "Five-one-two gigawatt payload ready."  
  
A visor unfolded from the ceiling of the command ship, and settled into position just above Robotnik's eyes. Overseeing the process himself gave long-distance killing a much more personal feel. He liked it. From the command ship's cameras at full magnification, he saw the hover car race across the firebreak towards his city. He set to work acquiring the shooting solution  
  
"Marker lights on the objective."  
  
As Robotnik watched, red crosshairs appeared above the image of the beleaguered hover car, and began narrowing towards a shooting solution.  
  
***  
  
The swarm had thinned somewhat in the past few seconds of flying, although the air behind them was still echoed with the firecracker booms of detonating missiles and narrowly-evaded laser blasts. Bunnie kept her jaw locked solid, and tried not to think about what happened to Griff. She didn't know if he was still alive or not, only that he hadn't moved since the car had been struck. It was up to her to make sure that it didn't happen to the rest of them.  
  
She kept a steady cruising altitude of barely over four meters, far closer than she ever thought she would dare. Occasionally she just missed smashing into an outcropping of dirt, and knew that whenever she clipped the top of a dune in the firebreak's eroded soil, she left pieces of the hover car behind. Spouts of dust continually erupted all around her. The plumes of laser and missile impacts shot up far higher than the car. But it was thinning. They were able to avoid them.  
  
There were only three Stealthbots behind them now; the fourth had veered off to the right for no readily apparent reason, and had lost its quarry. The remaining ones were able to keep up the pressure, although they were firing fewer and fewer missiles to conserve their payloads.  
  
By chance alone, a single ray of sunlight had broken through the smog over Robotropolis. The bilious clouds had been agitated by the chase and a part of the shroud had miraculously been budged aside. Bunnie stared at it. She couldn't recall the last time a ray of sunshine had touched any of the perpetually dark city.  
  
Rotor had seen it, too, and was just allowing himself to become optimistic again. "Maybe we'll make it after all," he said. The crackle of explosions had died down enough to let her actually hear his voice, another sign that the pursuit was slackening.  
  
"If nothin' else happens... maybe..."  
  
The ray of sunlight disappeared, cut off once again by the swirling smog.  
  
Bunnie realized the battlefield had grown calm in the last few seconds. That wasn't right at all. She was a great believer in the power of optimism, but at the same time she was a realist, too, and knew that odds of the pursuit just slackening enough to let her through were impossibly low. Something else was going to happen. Robotnik was doing it on purpose, to prepare for... what?  
  
An incredible dread settled over her, and she knew that all the calm had been was the eye of the storm.  
  
The world-  
  
***  
  
The red crosshairs centered on the hover car, and began blinking frantically. Text underneath the image confirmed that a shooting solution had been established. The mortar cannons had a target at last.  
  
Robotnik grinned savagely.  
  
"Fire!" he shouted, and slammed his fist down on the strike controls.  
  
***  
  
-exploded, flinging shards of dirt and mud and debris upwards all around them in a hailstorm of fire and destruction a hundredfold more intense than any that had ever preceded it. Bright red beams as thick as the Lower Mobius tunnel system slammed down into the ground to all sides of the hover car, and although they were concentrated on an area far too wide to actually strike the car by chance, they were more than capable of causing enough problems on their own.  
  
The molecular-binding generators whined and crackled as they overloaded. The hull was punctured several times instantaneously. The noise of the wind, which had been howling and thundering through the hole already punched through the hover car, grew louder still as the passenger compartment was ruptured by pieces of plasma and charred rock that, moment earlier, had been part of the firebreak. Beam after beam slammed down into the ground all around them, throwing up more and more deadly debris. Whatever the weapon was, Bunnie knew that the only way to avoid taking damage now was to gain altitude. She yanked the steering column towards her chest, and the car jerked upwards. The centripetal acceleration slammed her backwards.  
  
Rotor shouted something, but Bunnie couldn't hear him. She was too busy trying to gain altitude as more and more of the red beams smashed apart the firebreak. The car rose from the veil of debris. The red beams stopped emerging from the sky as soon as they could no longer hurt the hover car, but the three Stealthbots were still in pursuit. They hadn't been affected by the intense laser concussions. And, now that the hover car had been forced to raise its altitude, their missiles would be deadly accurate.  
  
Amidst the furious swirling specks that was the motion sensor, Bunnie saw three more dots appear as the Stealthbots launched another salvo of missiles. She was caught between two extremes: gain too much altitude, and face the missiles. Get too low, and face whatever those… beams had been. There was no middle ground.  
  
The missiles careened towards them. Bunnie drove the hover car as towards the ground, and flattened their trajectory just in time to avoid crashing into it. The missiles patterned into the firebreak behind them. Rotor shouted soundlessly again.  
  
***  
  
"Five-one-two gigawatt battery loaded," Snively reported, eager to please. Robotnik saw the hover car dive down again towards the ground. "Second salvo is ready to fire. Shooting solution already established."  
  
***  
  
"What'd you say?" Bunnie tried to shout over the wind.  
  
She could barely make out Rotor's voice. "I said the fuel tank's been ruptured!"  
  
Sure enough, a clear liquid was trailing from the rear of damaged hover car, splashing uselessly against the scorched dirt of the firebreak. Bunnie checked the fuel gauge. They were losing it so quickly that the tank would be completely empty in less than half a minute. The fossil fuel engines that Griff had said earlier was so responsible for their speed advantage really was going to kill them now. They'd never make it to even the outskirts of the Robotropolis now, let alone Robotnik's castle in the middle of the city.  
  
It was the worst blow of them all.  
  
Before they'd at least had a chance. No matter how stupid or unlikely, there was always the possibility that they'd be able to somehow sneak inside of Robotnik's city and put everything to rights. That chance was gone now. They wouldn't make it past the firebreak. A minute of fuel wouldn't get them far. Bunnie hurled a wordless cry of frustration at the universe, and, if it hadn't been for Griff and Rotor, would've smashed the hover car into the ground then and there.  
  
She hated Laurentis for inventing the nodule, she hated Robotnik for wanting her dead, and she hated herself for being too cowardly to confront this when she had a chance.  
  
Some instinct she couldn't name made her keep fighting. The thought that had struck her before the chase came back suddenly and fiercely. She was going to die here, but maybe the others wouldn't. More immediately, she was aware that the long-range beams would be able to strike again now that she was close to the ground. Amid the overwhelming sensorium of blinding tears and deafening noise, she became acutely conscious of the steering column, and gave it a last desperate pull upwards to avoid the next strike of the beams. Only to see that she was too late-  
  
***  
  
"Fire charge two!" Robotnik howled at the wounded hover car in his visor's screen. The mortar cannons discharged again, careening his fury towards the battle in the most violent way possible.  
  
***  
  
The hover car shot out of the new cloud of massive red laser beams and flying dust and plasma like it had been shot out of a cannon, and in worse shape than ever before. Exhaust spewed not only out of the two rear thrusters, but from numerous holes punctured in their sides. Yellow hull began to blacken and char as the intense heat of the combustion reaction began to misfire and spew its energies in directions the designers had never intended it to, all the while continuing to drain a dwindling fuel supply that would barely last another three minutes.  
  
Bunnie sealed her eyes shut as the mysterious laser rain seared through the air around her. Whenever she did manage to catch a glimpse of their source, it seemed to be coming from the horizon itself. Whatever was firing them was impossibly distant. Year-old memories tugged at her frayed mind. Sonic had talked about something like this before, some kind of laser hooked up to a radar that tracked his movements. It had behaved similar to this beam. Was it the same technology? Oh, it hardly mattered now…  
  
Rotor was visibly shaking in the seat next to her, fully expecting to die in the next few seconds. She still couldn't tell if Griff was breathing or not. They were bystanders, she thought, they shouldn't be here. They were here because of her cowardice in refusing to face the existence of the transmitter. They had no right to die with her. There had to have been some way of dropping them off earlier!  
  
Some way-  
  
At that instant, Bunnie knew what she had to do.  
  
The hover car rose away from the mortar cannon impact points, beyond the harmful debris clouds of their blasts, and the red beams cut off instantly. But they had risen back into the altitude where the Stealthbots had their best missile guidance. The car had risen too steeply, too; there wasn't enough time to reverse its direction and get low enough to avoid them again.  
  
With dreadful certainty, Bunnie knew that the next missile volley would kill her.  
  
She thought only of one thing.  
  
Rotor and Griff had to be out of the hover car by then.  
  
"Rotor, whatever ya do, keep your arms and legs away from the walls!" she shouted, hoping beyond hope that he could make out her words above the continuing thunder of the air hammering through the hole in the passenger compartment. If he couldn't, he might lose a limb just from the sheer alone. She only wished that she could give the same warning to Griff, but he was completely out of commission for the time being.  
  
"What are you going to do?" he shouted above the wind.  
  
She didn't answer. On the befuddled motion sensor, three bright dots streaked away from the symbols that represented the Stealthbots. Just as Bunnie had feared, she was left with too little time to reverse the car's course. Even if she pulled the steering column as far as it would go, they would still be too high up to nullify the missiles' radar guidance. The blast would be assuredly fatal. Two seconds.  
  
Bunnie wished for just another moment of life, a last chance to take in the sights and sounds of the real, physical world before it was ripped away from her. Even the scar of scorched dirt that was the firebreak could be a suitable last sight. She didn't have time for that, though. She only concentrated on two things: finding the right buttons on the dashboard, and pouring her heart into her last message for Rotor, and shouting it with enough volume so that he could not possibly miss hearing it.  
  
"AH LOVE YOU!"  
  
The eject toggles were patterned in a series of four buttons, arranged in a square-shaped panel. Bunnie slammed two fingers into the buttons that matched Rotor and Griff's seats, and pressed them down with all the effort she could muster.  
  
The last thing she saw of Rotor was his eyes wide open in shock. Whether it was from her words, or the surprise at the ejecting seat pushing him upwards, she couldn't tell. The glass roof covering the passenger compartment snapped backwards.  
  
A louder rush of wind, and they were gone. There was almost a palpable sense of vacuum, an emptiness, where Rotor's seat had been.  
  
The missiles careened towards her in a half-second of deceptive silence.  
  
She no longer wanted the few extra seconds to look around at the world. Had she any time left to her, she knew she would spend it sobbing. She let go of the steering column. It was all over now. She had failed to disarm the Laurentis nodule. Robotnik's weapons, though, had left her tear ducts no time to squeeze out even a single drop of salty water.  
  
In the rear view mirror, the missiles had grown large impossibly fast.  
  
With fearsome suddenness, the universe was torn asunder. 


	14. Worse Than Death

Snively had never seen Robotnik move so quickly in his life.  
  
One moment, the tyrant had been in the chair mounted in the center of the command ship, the visor pulled down across his face, grinning fiercely at the sight of yet another foe's defeat. Snively had been facing the tactical display; he never even saw him start to move. Robotnik had suddenly lunged forward and slammed a great fist down on Snively's control panel with no more warning than a slight grunt. Three dots on the tactical display disappeared in tandem.  
  
Snively watched, too startled to do anything. On the monitor before him, one of the many camera views zoomed in on the distant hover car seemed to erupt into a solid yellow flame as the missiles chasing the rabbit detonated simultaneously.  
  
Out of the yellow mist flew the hover car. It was singed by the explosion, but otherwise intact.  
  
"No, sir!" Snively cried in shock. He only knew that the longer Bunnie Rabbot remained alive, the more upset Robotnik would be. And when Robotnik was unhappy, things generally went bad for himself. Why did he always behave so unpredictably? Why had he just saved the rabbit's life? "Why did you detonate the missiles early?"  
  
"Didn't you see it, Snively?" Robotnik asked incredulously, still leaning over the controls. His eyes gleamed as he spoke. "She surrendered!"  
  
"What?"  
  
"There! Two objects just ejected from the hover car. Two passengers."  
  
Snively checked his displays. Robotnik was right. Two people had just been pushed upwards, still attached to their chairs by seat belts. Neither of them were the rabbit. They were floating down to the scorched dirt below. As to how Robotnik had spotted them in the chaos of everything else that had been happening, Snively didn't know. He himself wouldn't have been able to see it unless he had known what to look for. Either those glowing red eyes were more observant than he had revealed before, or… he had been waiting for it to happen. But Snively couldn't discern its relevance to the chase.  
  
"I still don't understand."  
  
"She was convinced that she was going to die, Snively. She wanted to save the others before it all ended, and threw them out."  
  
"If you say so, sir," Snively said, still bewildered.  
  
"She was convinced that death was the worst possible thing in her future." Robotnik finally removed himself from the control panel, stood up, and glared at the tactical display. He looked *hungry*. "I've learned many things about the art of revenge over the decade of my rule. Surely you must know that by now. But the greatest lesson is that, whenever your prey thinks that the worst thing possible has already happened to it, the only way to give the dagger an extra twist is to inflict something even worse."  
  
Robotnik moved back to his chair, and heaved himself back into a sitting position. His cheeks burned a red bright enough to match the angry glow of his mechanical eye-sockets.  
  
"She's convinced that the worst that could ever happen to her was death. Roboticization can be infinitely more painful than even that. Ejecting her friends was a sign of weakness, Snively, a sign that she is helpless. She is mine."  
  
Snively understood now. He shivered.  
  
"I trust the roboticizer was left warmed up after our original departure, Snively?"  
  
"Yes, sir," he answered shakily.  
  
"Order whatever hover units are left in the pursuit to come at her from above. No -- I repeat, absolutely no potentially lethal shots are to be fired. Order the hover units to arm their grappling hooks. And tell the workerbots outside my castle to prepare for their landing."  
  
***  
  
For the first few seconds, Bunnie didn't understand why she was still alive. The rear view mirror had turned a solid yellow blaze; the explosion was so close that some of the fire had even licked across the rear of the hover car. The shock wave had tossed the ship up and down so quickly that the two effects almost canceled each other out. But the missiles had detonated too early.  
  
Simultaneously, all three Stealthbots behinds her peeled back and voluntarily abandoned the pursuit. Bunnie watched them with a slack jaw, unwilling - unable - to believe what she was seeing. With little warning, driving became surprisingly peaceful. There were no more laser blasts; the sky was so clear that she even caught a glimpse of Rotor and Griff gliding to the ground behind her  
  
But why had this happened?  
  
Then she saw the hover units diving down towards her, and suddenly she knew.  
  
Two of them were coming fast, timing their downward plunges so that they would come level with the hover car on both its left and right side. Almost invisibly, pieces of the hover units' hull had peeled back to reveal small zones of shadow, and out of those gleamed the shiny metal tips. The hover car's engine was really struggling now: already it had lost the majority of its fuel. Speed was bleeding away. Not only was it impossible to finish crossing the firebreak and make it to Robotropolis, but the car could no longer outrun the hover units, either.  
  
Even though there was no longer any point to it, she fought anyway, with every last ounce of strength left to her.  
  
She managed to evade them for a little while. The first grappling hook missed wide when she quickly dodged to the left. The hover unit that fired withdrew the cord, and the metal hook snapped back into position. It fired again.  
  
This time it hit.  
  
The glass on the side of the passenger cabin shattered as the hook pierced it, and then fell limply to the floor where Griff's seat had been. Bunnie wrenched the steering column in the opposite direction as soon as she heard the noise. The grappling hook's cord was jerked back by the motion, but the hook itself had caught on the underside of the remaining seat, and stuck there. Both vehicles were linked by the cord, and the hover unit could easily overpower the car's ailing engine.  
  
Bunnie was jounced about by the force of the hover car's turn slamming to a stop.  
  
A second grappling hook, fired by the other hover unit punched through the car's metal siding. The energy force binding generators had already failed past the point where they couldn't even try to stop it. Even if they had been operating at one hundred percent efficiency, they probably couldn't have won against that kind of force.  
  
Then the last of the fuel spilled out to the ground outside, and the engine sputtered to a stop. The lights on the dashboard blinked, and went out. Even the motion sensor motion flickered and shut off.  
  
The wrecked hover car dangled helplessly between the two hover units, completely at their mercy.  
  
"No!" Bunnie cried.  
  
For a moment, she considered raising her metal arm and killing herself with it. One swift, solid blow to the head would do it. She had done worse to SWATbots. It was better that she die here, rather than face what Robotnik certainly had in store for her. The three metal fingers on her left hand made a fist, and she held up to her face. The gunmetal gray surface of her fingers was numb to all but the strongest of sensations, so she didn't feel the tears trickling from her check fur onto her hand. She could see them, though.  
  
She couldn't bring herself to do it. Slowly, she lowered her arm, and waited.  
  
Continuing the battle was the only alternative to such thoughts, she realized.  
  
Sally had once made each and every one of the one of the Freedom Fighters swear that, if they were ever captured, they would keep fighting Robotnik to the very end, no matter how hopeless the situation or how useless resistance was. Back then, Bunnie had held up her hand and repeated the words proudly. But now that she had actually met the end, she didn't feel up to fighting.  
  
Yet she found herself fighting anyway.  
  
She wrested with the useless steering column, hoping that - even with a dead engine - there were rudders or airbrakes somewhere that she was hitting, something that would effect the aerodynamics of their motion and make it just that much more difficult to bring her in. Taking a frantic guesses as to how some of the controls worked, she tried using what things remained working to hook the car's reserve battery up to the laser emitters in front. Surprisingly, on her third try, it worked. She fired shots wildly into the air. Unable to control the orientation of the hover car or the aim of the laser, she just fired.  
  
The hover units, Bunnie in tow, finished crossing over the firebreak and into the city.  
  
Bunnie's laser shots washed over factory smokestacks and city streets, the power of the blasts too weak to do any real good. Griff's laser just wasn't potent enough to break through ceilings or walls. After firing for what seemed like minutes on end, she was rewarded once, when a stray laser bolt struck a SWATbot patrolling the streets below. The laser was only ineffective on the scale of a vehicle; against an individual it was deadly. The hapless bot was spun around three times before falling dead to the ground. She cheered through tears, and kept her finger on the trigger.  
  
That she was going to be roboticized was a given. The only question on her mind was how long the reserve battery would hold up.  
  
She kept firing even when the hover units finally set the car down on a landing pad on top of Robotnik's fearsome ellipsoid castle. Even though the lasers faced a wall and were doing nothing more than blackening an armored metal wall, she kept firing. No SWATbots had approached her yet. She only looked up to see the command ship land nearby, and only then long enough to wish that the lasers were facing it.  
  
She knew that she had to fight as long as she could, because when he got a hold of her, it really was all over.  
  
***  
  
The command ship's ramp lowered soundlessly to the surface on the smooth metal landing pad, and even the dull thump of its impact against the ground was quiet enough to be drowned out by the breeze. Of course, the pad was perched near the very top of the castle, and the wind at this altitude was significant. The noise of the rabbit continually firing the hover car's useless lasers didn't help much, either.  
  
The very same wind fluttered Robotnik's cape behind him as he walked down the ramp, keeping the yellow cloth nearly horizontal. Occasionally Snively, walking behind him, had to constantly brush it out of his face or be blinded by it.  
  
He stepped off the ramp, and surveyed the scene before him.  
  
The two hover units had finished lowering their quarry to the ground, and were now regaining altitude and preparing to fly away. The rabbit's car itself - now a smoldering wreck of a ship with barely a smudge of yellow paint left - spewed smoke from the engine compartment. The gash that had been torn in the fuel tank was the largest of all the vessel's wounds, and occasionally a drop of clear liquid splattered on the ground beneath it.  
  
At least twenty SWATbots had been scrambled to the pad, and all of them had their gauntlet lasers covering the car from all sides. More were approaching from an elevator door nearby. None of them had strayed very close to the car itself, yet, though. They were waiting for his order.  
  
The landing pad was near the very top of the castle, but it wasn't the highest. There was a communication tower nearby, and, by lucky chance, the hover car had landed facing the control shed. Inside, the rabbit kept firing the lasers, probably hoping a stray SWATbot would stupidly wander into it. Robotnik shook his head. The SWATbot AI needed work, but it wasn't that bad. Meanwhile, the shed's metal wall was already beginning to blacken under the feeble but persistent assault. Given another five minutes or so, she might actually break through it.  
  
Robotnik sighed, wondering what it would take to force her to give up. He made up his mind to find out.  
  
He withdrew his own laser pistol from the holster, and with a single swift motion fired at hover car's small forward cannon. Behind him, Snively flinched at the sharp noise of the laser discharge - he hadn't been expecting it. His shot was far less powerful then the rabbit's cannon, but his aim was precise. He knocked the focusing crystal at the front of her weapon out of alignment. The next blast impacted against the walls of the barrel and backfired.  
  
Something underneath the hover car fizzed and crackled, and another plume of smoke joined the others lazily wafting through the air. Robotnik grinned. On his first shot, he had overloaded the car's battery. From somewhere at the very fringes of his perception, he thought he heard a wail of distress.  
  
He snapped his fingers at the line of waiting security droids, then pointed at the hover car. "Take her."  
  
Five SWATbots approached the hover car's driver side door. Three others covered each of the other exits, gauntlet lasers at the ready.  
  
From this distance, Robotnik could see nothing inside the passenger compartment. If any of the SWATbots could, they gave no sign of it. Following standard tactics, two of the five stepped forward to open the door, while the others got ready to open fire. That left six immediately able to cover them, and several dozen more waiting nearby.  
  
The door was opened.  
  
For a moment, nothing happened, and the first SWATbot's visor gleamed red in the smoggy daylight as it peered around inside. It didn't look like it saw anything, at least not before it was too late.  
  
A metal fist shattered the visor.  
  
Then the rabbit was on the ground, kicking out with her right foot. Shards of red glass still glinted on her left forearm. The first SWATbot didn't even have time to fall to the ground before her outstretched metal leg struck the second with enough force to cave in its chest plate. The horrendous sound of gears crunching and metal being twisted into new shapes split the air. The rabbit's face contorted into a triumphant snarl as her enemies fell.  
  
Robotnik's grin grew. She certainly had spirit. One of his favorite hobbies was crushing spirit. No, he decided, crushing was the wrong word. Violating was perhaps a better term.  
  
"Stun her," he commanded.  
  
Bunnie was struck in the face by three simultaneous blasts from the SWATbots arrayed in a line around the landing pad. Two more hit her stomach before she even started pinwheeling backwards. The SWATbots continued firing even as she fell. By the time she hit the ground, seven more stun bolts had hit her in the face alone.  
  
Robotnik paused for a moment, to let the atmosphere of the moment soak in.  
  
He shivered with pleasure.  
  
He walked over to the rabbit's slumbering form. She had grown since she had last been inside his roboticizer. She was taller, for one, and her proportions were more adult. He stopped for a moment, to wonder if that would affect the roboticization process. He had never partially roboticized someone in preadolescence, and then waited until they were nearly an adult to complete the procedure. Well, it would be… interesting to see what happened.  
  
Somehow, she was still wearing the same purple jumpsuit that she had donned those two years ago.  
  
Fitting.  
  
With a gentle shove, he pushed her over until she was laying on her back. There was no use wasting violence on someone rendered unconscious. It was best saved until they could feel it. Closed eyes stared upward, and her mouth was slightly open. The wet tip of her black button noise glinted, and so did the tears on her cheeks. She groaned slightly, but otherwise didn't stir.  
  
With one giant hand, he grabbed her by the cheeks, and squeezed until they were puckered. Not enough to hurt her if she were awake, but enough to puppet her. It felt so good to be in control of the unconscious prisoner. It would feel so good to throw her into the roboticizer. It would feel so good to kill her. After all she and her friends had done, it would feel *so* good to end her miserable existence and just make her suffer…  
  
"Sir?"  
  
Robotnik was once again aware of Snively, standing right behind him. After another moment, he let go of Bunnie's face, and stood up.  
  
"Snively," he intoned threateningly, "don't ever interrupt a moment like that again."  
  
"Yes, sir," the frail human said, subdued.  
  
He looked down at the fallen form of Bunnie Rabbot, and took one last deep breath. Then he gestured to two of the SWATbots standing nearby. Obediently, they stepped forward, and waited for his word.  
  
"Take her down to the roboticizer chamber," he ordered, and to his lackey, "and you, Snively, are going to help me modify the equipment again, and prepare to complete the Laurentis process. After two years," he glared down at Bunnie, "it's time to finish our test run."  
  
***  
  
After the ceaseless racket of the turbulent chase, Rotor had thought that the next moment he could hear blessed silence would be the happiest time of his life. The quiet now, though, was nearly unbearable. Stillness on a battlefield he could never stand. The aftermath felt too much like death. During the entire time he had coasted to the bottom of the firebreak, he had seen what had happened to Bunnie. She hadn't been killed, she had been captured. To the very core of his being, he was convinced that roboticization was a fate worse then death.  
  
Had he been in Bunnie's place, he knew he would've wanted to die.  
  
Her last words still echoed between his ears.  
  
Rotor groaned weakly, and rolled off the side of the chair, and onto the solid dirt ground of the firebreak. His body had been through too much. The back of his head was still bleeding where the glass fragments had struck him. The ride in the hover car itself had been bad enough to induce nausea, but the acceleration of the ejecting seat had nearly broken his arms. The deceleration hadn't been so bad; the thrusters on the bottom of the chair had acted almost like a parachute in cushioning his fall. Yet, the majority of his internal organs felt as though they had been ripped out by the sheer force of his violent departure, and left behind. His heart especially.  
  
The only other people who had ever told him, "I love you," had been his parents, and they had been roboticized when he was only five.  
  
He tried to push himself into a sitting position, and managed to best his spinning head for just long enough to get a clear view of where he was. He was only the dry brown silt of the firebreak, surrounded by smoke and dust. Craters littered the ground. Some of them were old, but most were new, and had been blasted out of the decayed soil during the battle. Long, thin streams of smoke poured out of most of those. There was a crushing sensation of silence that went beyond hearing alone to oppress his very soul.  
  
"Oh, Bunnie…"  
  
His voice echoed. Rotor didn't care who heard it.  
  
The yellow-upholstered chair that had come with him from the hover car was lying at his side. As far as he could tell, he was alone. The SWATbots had ignored him after Bunnie had ejected him. He almost wished it were the other way around. If Robotnik had the presence of mind to send units after him, too, it would mean he wasn't so single-mindedly fixated on Bunnie, and things might go a little easier on her.  
  
No, he saw after giving his surroundings a more detailed examination, he wasn't alone. The top of Griff's chair was visible just over a slight mound in the dirt. It had landed sideways. The deceleration thrusters were still firing uselessly into the air, and couldn't tell that they had landed.  
  
He summoned whatever strength hadn't been vanquished by the ride, and scrambled over to the seat.  
  
Griff still hadn't moved. Arms and legs were lolling limply off the side of the upturned chair. His eyes were closed, and blood trickled down his forehead. The burning thrusters were nearly singing the fur off his legs. As soon has he saw it, Rotor lunged forward for the deactivation catch. The jets stopping spewing flames. He bent forward to examine the mountain goat.  
  
The rise and fall of Griff's chest was barely perceptible, but present nonetheless.  
  
Rotor sagged with relief, and collapsed into the dirt.  
  
The next thing he was conscious of was a steady bass beat, like that of a distant drum. He looked up, but could see nothing in the smoke of the battle's aftermath. The sound was moving, growing closer. It wasn't a drum, either, it was like the great quantity of air being forced into motion. Or the flapping of great wings.  
  
Rotor suddenly found the capability to rise to his feet.  
  
"Dulcy!" he shouted.  
  
Led by his voice, the dragon's form gradually appeared from behind a plume of smoke. Exhausted, she was barely able to keep aloft now. When she spotted Rotor on the ground, she changed her direction and came to a crash- landing nearby.  
  
Sonic and Sally had braced for such an event, and immediately regained their footing after being thrown clear of Dulcy's back. They rushed towards Rotor.  
  
He didn't take the time to embrace them, or even acknowledge their existence beyond pointing at the upturned seat and shouting, "Griff's hurt!"  
  
It wasn't long before Sally was bent over the wounded mountain goat, scanning Nicole back and forth across his limp body and waiting for the computer to diagnose him. Rotor's expertise was in machines, not people; he couldn't make sense of any of the medical babble that Nicole spewed out. Sonic was kneeling next to her, looking at Griff with something like dismay on his face. Wheezing heavily, Dulcy trotted up behind him and plopped heavily to the ground. Even her exhaustion couldn't hide the worry on her face when she saw Griff, though.  
  
After listening to Nicole thoughtfully, Sally proclaimed, "He's been received a concussion from some kind of blast. With all the glass fragments in his skin, I'd say it came from the laser we saw hit the car." She closed Nicole, and clipped her back onto her boot. "He'll be all right. Probably take a couple hours to wake up, but he'll be all right. Now, Rotor, what's been going on with Bunnie?"  
  
He gave them the abridged story.  
  
***  
  
It began just like it had before.  
  
When she had been shot in the alleyway, two years ago, the effect of the stun had lifted away slowly, like a morning fog being burned away by the sun. Only the sun was the most painful thing in the universe, and she would give anything to avoid its rays. Reality hurt. The smothering fog of unconsciousness had been the most welcome thing in the universe, and it was leaving her no matter how hard she clutched at it.  
  
This time, though, the fog hurt almost as bad as the sun. She had been shot one two many times. The multiple stun bolts had thrown her into a sleep that tormented her subconscious. Shadows chased her through the fog. Apparitions of mist reached out and impaled her. Friends withered and fell in front of her. Even spending an eternity in this hell, though, would be preferable over what awaited her in the realm of the living. Metal feet clanked in the background.  
  
Always throughout the fog there was the image of a horribly familiar face, mustache twitching in the fat smile constantly in motion below it, and the echo of a menacing laugh. The image grew stronger as time went on.  
  
It turned out that the truth breaking through the smog.  
  
Last time she had waken up surrounded by SWATbots on the floor of the roboticizer chamber, Robotnik leering over her. This time was so much alike that she thought she might just be suffering through a flashback. No, it couldn't, her legs and left arm were solid metal this time. And there were far more SWATbots.  
  
She groaned, and tried moving her head. It was a mistake to try. She fell back to the floor, retching with a dry heave. The overdose of stun bolts had left her more nauseated then she'd ever been before.  
  
Robotnik began laughing harder.  
  
The roboticizer chamber had hardly changed in the past two years, but Bunnie had known that before. The tube still hung from the ceiling, the glass prison as yet undeployed. It would only be lowered when she was cast into it. The machinery above it was ambiguous in its precise functioning but obvious in its overall purpose. From that emitter in the ceiling would come the transforming beam, the clinical malevolence that had transmuted her flesh to metal two years ago. It had patiently waited all this time to finish its task.  
  
Two SWATbots were standing at attention behind her. As if Robotnik had remembered her kick to his groin two years ago, another was standing in front of her. Snively was readying at the roboticizer's controls, readying it to finalize her enslavement. Resting innocently on a tray nearby was the Laurentis blade.  
  
"Well, you've been rather slow to regain consciousness." Robotnik was clearly enjoying her horror. He had said the exact thing to her two years ago. He wanted her to know that this had been inevitable, and her subconscious believed him. "Almost as if you didn't want to. Can't say I blame you."  
  
***  
  
"Nicole, give me a schematic display of Robotnik's headquarters."  
  
Griff's head had been bandaged, and his limp body had been placed upon Dulcy's back. He would be all right later, but he couldn't do much for them now. The dragon was happy to maintain a lookout for any incoming hover units, as the inactivity gave her a chance to rest. Sonic and Rotor had clustered around Sally's handheld computer.  
  
The hologram flickered into existence, but the floor plan was decidedly unhelpful in its present state, even with a map of the local security setup.  
  
"Let's see," Sally said, rubbing her chin as she figured aloud, "after all the fighting, Robotnik's security is probably still on a code red alert. Nicole, change the diagram of the castle's security to match."  
  
The hologram obediently changed.  
  
"Plot out every option we have, and try and find the route that will get us to the roboticizer as quickly as possible, and as safely as possible." Sally wasn't very optimistic about the chances of Nicole finding something they could use, but knew she had to try anyway. Red lines flashed across the castle schematic as the computer quickly simulated the results of infiltrations from every angle. After a few seconds of rapid calculations, Nicole beeped in display.  
  
"THERE IS NO OPTION THAT WILL NOT RESULT IN DANGEROUS CONFLICT," she reported. "ALL ENTRANCES AND EXITS ARE CODELOCKED AND HEAVILY GUARDED. ALL AIR DUCTS ARE NOW BEING PATROLLED BY CAMERA ORBS."  
  
"Then we have to try fighting our way in," Sally said, discouraged by receiving the answer she knew had been coming. She slipped Nicole back into her boot. "There's no other way around it."  
  
"No problemo," Sonic said, clenching his fist. "When Bunnie first got roboticized, I got in by bashing through the SWATbutts at the front door. We can do it again."  
  
"Sonic, there wasn't a code red alarm back then," Sally said. "We'll be lucky if there's less than thirty SWATbots waiting for us there."  
  
"We're gonna have to go anyway. Sal, there isn't any other way around it."  
  
"Sonic's right," Rotor said. "If we're going to save her, we're going to have to go in headfirst. I know that rushing an attack before we have a plan isn't something we do often, but it's either that or run out of time."  
  
"I know, but-"  
  
Sally didn't finish. She was once again conscious of the weight across her shoulder. The strap that held her laser rifle had remained in place throughout her entire ride on Dulcy. The power cells were still clipped into place, and ready for use. She had only had to use a weapon a few times before, and had hoped to never take it out again.  
  
Whenever missions had spiraled out of control far enough to justify its use, it was usually too late to do any good. She had come to think of the rifle as a bad luck charm. This chase had spiraled that far out of control. Using it would be like admitting defeat. But they were desperate, and there wasn't any other choice.  
  
Sally turned around, and called "Dulcy, you'd better take Griff back to Knothole."  
  
"Okay, just don't expect me to fly there very fast. What are you guys going to do?"  
  
"What we have to."  
  
She reached into her backpack, and felt around for the smooth torus she knew would be waiting there. The power ring's texture was one of the most unique things on Mobius. It didn't feel like metal, and it didn't feel like plastic, but it was somehow an amalgamation of both of them. It was warm to the touch, too. Her hand glowed when she pulled it out, and slapped it into Sonic's waiting palm.  
  
The power ring flashed the instant it touched his glove, and an energy discharge like a thunder blast split the air. A translucent sphere of solid gold energy encompassed Sonic momentarily. Sneakers became a solid white glare. His face perked up, visibly energized.  
  
"Yeah!"  
  
The glow surged in strength until it had become almost opaque, and then collapsed to wrap around him. He was ready.  
  
"Sal, grab on to me, and Rotor, grab on to Sal. And hang on - this isn't gonna be smooth sailing for long."  
  
A streak of gold-tinted fur and quills blasted away from the firebreak and into the city, making a beeline for Robotnik's castle. The power ring led their path. The city sped by them on fast-forward.  
  
"Hang on, Bunnie!" Sonic's voice shouted from the blur. "We're comin'!" 


	15. The Diamond Glass Gambit

Author's note:  
  
Hrmm.  
  
I know it's been a long time - several months without an update, actually - but doesn't mean I've given up. I've just shifted my priorities, and now they've shifted back. For the past several months, my energy has been tied up in another novel-length story (that doesn't have much to do with Sonic, unfortunately), and in scriptwriting for an online Sonic fancomic. Now that I've got most of the scripts done, I've been able to redirect energy back to the 'Laurentis Countdown'.  
  
The other novel-length story has really been the focus of my time, lately. It's something I actually started, for no discernible reason, between chapters in the 'Laurentis Countdown'. I don't know why I started to work on that, except that I felt I needed to.  
  
I don't really need to go into the full details, but here's a simplified reason (read: excuse) for the delay: "Impulsiveness plus a paradoxically long attention span equals the 'Laurentis Countdown''s odd update time."  
  
Anyway, I made a promise to finish this in one of my previous updates, and I'll be damned if I don't follow through on that.  
  
Viva Bunnie Rabbot!  
  
-Tristan Palmgren  
  
***  
  
Bunnie gaped up at Robotnik.  
  
"Why, it's been too long, halfbreed. You really should drop in more often." The fat tyrant's fist slammed against the tray holding the Laurentis blade. Then, as if to prove contrast, he slid his palm gently across the roboticizer's control panel, caressing it. "We kept the accommodations just the way you left them."  
  
He was playing with his prey. Bunnie just stared at him. She couldn't do anything else; her mind was still partially immersed in the fog of the stun bolts.  
  
Robotnik studied her unmoving dumbfounded expression.  
  
"Practicing for your future?" he asked, mockingly. "You'll be wearing that expression a lot, very soon. You won't be able to help yourself."  
  
She tried to move. Her metal limbs were responsive enough, but her only organic arm felt as if its muscles had been replaced by thick, stuffy cotton. It moved in the direction she told it, but with nowhere near the strength she thought it should have. She tried to push herself to a sitting position, but instead lost her balance and flopped weakly to the ground. In the core of her identity that remained uninhibited by the heavy stun, she figured that the entire display must have looked quite pathetic.  
  
Predictably, Robotnik enjoyed watching it.  
  
"It'll be easier to keep your balance once this is all over," he said, when the laughter stopped. "I'll be able to control it very efficiently."  
  
"Go," she managed to force her vocal cords into action, "to hell."  
  
"I'll see you there first," he said, pleasantly. "Only I can make absolutely sure that you're living in one." A hand scratched across the layers of flab underneath his chin. "We'll put you in charge of routine roboticizations. How would you like that, hm? You, personally, being the one responsible for overseeing the enslavement of your fellow runaways?"  
  
She shuddered.  
  
Robotnik decided that the time for the order had come at last. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Put her in the roboticizer," he ordered.  
  
Two SWATbots grabbed her by the arms, and began dragging her forward, past the tray that held the Laurentis blade. She tried to struggle, and succeeded in knocking it over. Something clattered noisily on the ground. The 'bots quickly subdued her, though. Her sense of balance was still sporadic after the stun barrage, and her mechanical limbs couldn't get enough distance to build up a damaging velocity. All her effort got her was a hard landing on the floor.  
  
She gasped sharply as she landed; the blow had been hard.  
  
"I never get tired of watching this," Robotnik remarked idly, holding up his hand to indicate for the SWATbots to pause. He bent down to examine her face. "With you, it's even doubly as exciting. Oh, yes, always with that angry, determined expression. You think you're so strong. How's it feel to know that in the end, it was only ever really an act? How's it feel to know, at last, that it's not the truth?"  
  
He was clearly waiting for an answer.  
  
"Maybe this really was inevitable," Bunnie said, "Maybe it's been waitin' to happen for two years. Maybe Ah've just been as good as dead for that long." Her face contorted into the same expression Robotnik had just spoken of. His invoking it had given her the strength to wear it. "Ah don't really care. If Ah've been as good as roboticized since you did this to me, than at least Ah managed to do a lot of fightin' against in you in the mean time. You may have mah life, but it doesn't matter when Ah've saved so many others in the two years left to me."  
  
Robotnik's massive face distorted into a grimace of disgust. But Bunnie wasn't done yet.  
  
"Most importantly," she snarled, "you don't have what really matters, either. You don't have what you were really after. You thought that, when you activated the beacon, you'd get Knothole, too. You didn't, you only got me. I hope you are right, Robotnik. I hope this really was inevitable. If it was, you haven't won anything. I haven't given you *them*. They'll keep fighting you, and they'll *win*!"  
  
Instead of the anger, malice, or simple contempt that she had expected from him, he did the last thing he expected, and cracked a smile. "The day is young, rabbit."  
  
His voice cut like glass slivers, and was cold with foreboding. It sent chills down Bunnie's spine. She swallowed down her dread, and dismissed it. "Don't you get it? You don't have them! I haven't brought them to you! You lost!"  
  
"You haven't brought them to me, *yet*."  
  
"The game's over," Bunnie repeated. "You don't have them."  
  
He shook his head. "At times, I'm almost envious of your innocence. You just don't understand people like I do." He clasped his fist closed around something, and righted the tipped tray. The Laurentis blade wasn't on it. "This isn't over, not until we're *all* together. Like all good games, this one only ends in the final act."  
  
Bunnie didn't understand, but was never going to admit as much.  
  
He proclaimed proudly, "Nothing's over until I say it is!"  
  
Robotnik stood suddenly, decisively, and stalked over to roboticizer control panel, where his frail nephew was frowning at him. "Snively! I believe you have a report to make?"  
  
For the first time, Bunnie noticed the amber warning signs flashing at the edges of her perception. It was an alarm, one associated with a security alert. She shook her head. She had already been subdued, though, those alerts shouldn't still be on. They should have been shut off the moment she was captured. That was just the way the computer worked.  
  
"Yes, sir! The Freedom Fighters have been spotted approaching the castle. The hedgehog is carrying two of them, sir, the princess and the walrus. They're moving towards the castle's front entrance."  
  
Bunnie cried a wordless noise of horror.  
  
"Now you understand, rabbit!" Robotnik yelled triumphantly. "You have brought them to me, just like I knew you would!"  
  
The SWATbots began dragging her towards the roboticizer again. This time, she couldn't resist at all.  
  
"A last-minute rescue, just like last time," he mused. "Too predictable. I didn't even need to check the monitors to see if they were following you. I knew they would. They always do."  
  
"No!" Bunnie didn't shout at him, or anyone who could hear her. All she wanted was for Sonic to turn around, and run as fast as his renowned legs could carry him. She had worked so hard to die alone.  
  
Don't let it happen to them, too!  
  
"Our trap is ready, then, Snively?"  
  
"Completely primed, sir. When they arrive, it'll be ready to activate."  
  
Robotnik's grin grew inhumanly large. Impossibly square-shaped teeth glinted in the light, and reflected the bright red of the flashing security alarm. "They're on our territory now. We have them. Bring it up on the forward monitor. I want to watch."  
  
***  
  
It had once been the corner of an avenue that had spanned the entire city. It still did, in a sense, although explosion craters and other miscellaneous potholes that had collected over a decade made it no longer navigable by anything except foot. This corner had once separated the old castle and the verdant, lush parkland Sally had been so fond of playing in as a child. Robotnik had built a weapons factory over the park after the coup, its construction squashing the grass flat. He hadn't seen its beauty, only an empty lot.  
  
Although the odors of pollution and industrial waste were overpowering, as always, the stink of decaying vegetable matter also tickled Sally's nose. The only remnant of the park's green.  
  
The factory was on their side now, though.  
  
Without it, they would have been completely exposed to Robotnik's security. It's mass concealed them from the view of the cameras. She and Sonic crouched behind a pile of metallic refuse, and surveyed the castle's front entrance.  
  
Four SWATbot guards stood motionlessly in front of it, and no doubt many more waited inside.  
  
Sonic's quills bristled, an occasional spark of gold lightning playing back and forth across them. The power ring's charge had shown no signs of abating.  
  
Sally knew that there would be no jokes cracked now, no snide comments nor cooler-than-thou cracks. Not until his friends were out of danger. He hadn't even complained when Sally had made him stop here, instead of charging straight in, though she maintained no illusions that he would have halted if she weren't there. He glared at the castle's entrance, and looked at Rotor.  
  
"We can get past them, I know it," he asserted. "What do you two say?"  
  
"There's more than just those four, Sonic," Sally hissed. None of them dared speak any louder; the streets carried their voices all too well. "We can't just run past them and hope we don't get shot. We're too far away. They'd have too much warning."  
  
"We've taken risks before. It's a sure thing-"  
  
They didn't have time for this. Sally couldn't pull any punches here. Bluntly, she interrupted, "Are you willing to stake Bunnie's life on it?"  
  
Sonic considered that for a moment, and clamped his mouth shut. He didn't say anything else.  
  
"Sally," Rotor said, "is there any way we could use that rifle to distract them?"  
  
"Took the thought right out of my head, Rotor." She pulled the weapon around her shoulder, and pulled the strap over her arm until it was free. She checked the power cell to make sure it was still fully charged. It was. "We can lure them over here-"  
  
***  
  
"-and have Sonic ambush them once they're close enough." Sally's voice sounded hollow in the audio feed. There was a *click*, and then the person on the vast forward monitor said, "Nicole, give me a tactical analysis."  
  
Bunnie had to admit that Robotnik was capable of learning. He had anticipated all of this to a frightening degree. There were too many traps in the way of her friends now, and they had just stumbled into one of them.  
  
Too many times the Freedom Fighters had used piles of refuse as cover to hide from SWATbot patrols and camera orbs - they were convenient hiding places, and there were too many to clean completely. Robotnik had taken great pleasure in explaining to her how he had planted false piles in opportune places around the city. Her friends had fallen for one the traps.  
  
None of them, not even Nicole, saw the unblinking eye of the hidden camera staring mutely at them.  
  
Bunnie's organic hand tested the borders of the glass cage that kept her inside the roboticizer chamber, occasionally stopping to plead with unheeding friends to turn around while they still could.  
  
"Sir," Snively asked, "should we warn the SWATbots about them? They can't ambush our guards if the guards know they're there, sir."  
  
"I don't expect that it'll make much of a difference in the end," Robotnik sighed. "They'll get through regardless. Besides, it would spoil all the fun if we caught them now."  
  
"Yes, sir."  
  
Robotnik grinned malevolently at Bunnie, at then turned back to the camera view.  
  
"Spoil all the fun."  
  
Although she knew it wouldn't do much good, she opened her left hand, to try and use her artificial strength to break free of the transparent prison. She stopped when she realized that her three metal fingers had unconsciously curled around an object, and had been holding it for some time. Startled, Bunnie glanced down at her hand, and gawked at it.  
  
Clasped in the recesses of her artificial palm, the Laurentis blade stared back at her.  
  
She realized she must have grabbed it in the scuffle, when its tray had been knocked over. She vaguely remembering falling atop of something then. that must have been when she had grabbed it, without realizing it.  
  
Bunnie quickly closed her fist around it again, before Robotnik could spot it. When he did glance back at her again, his gaze met her snarl. He raised an amused eyebrow, but turned back to the monitor.  
  
For what seemed like the first time in her life, she knew something he didn't.  
  
She didn't know how she could use this to her advantage, but she also knew that if she had any chance of saving her friends, it lay in this blade.  
  
***  
  
Sally darted around the corner, and leveled the rifle's barrel at the closest of the four SWATbots. Energy spat out the nozzle.  
  
The civilian laser was weak compared to the military models Robotnik's security robots were outfitted with, but with a true aim, it was still capable of major damage. An azure laser beam splashed against the SWATbot's glowing red visor, shattering it and frying the circuitry in its metal head. It stumbled backwards, and fell to the ground.  
  
Simultaneously, the remaining three SWATbots raised their arms, and took aim with their gauntlet lasers.  
  
But Sally had already ducked back around the junk pile.  
  
The bots' reaction was immediate. All three charged forward as one, racing toward towards the debris she had ducked behind, racing to catch the intruder before she could make a getaway. The sound of their metal boots stamping against the ground echoed across the roadway.  
  
When they were two meters away, Sonic made his move.  
  
If he had attacked from across the street, they might've had enough of a warning to raise and aim their gauntlet lasers. As incredible as his vaunted speed was, at a distance, he was still vulnerable enough to give the SWATbots a shot at victory. At a mere two meters, though, they never stood a chance.  
  
A ball of whirling blue spines barreled into the chest of one bot, pushing it back into another at a significant velocity. They split into pieces before they hit the ground. By the time the remnants had clattered to the road, the third SWATbot was already falling apart.  
  
Yellow energy crackled around the power ring Sonic held as he spun to a halt. The toroid glared with a burning intensity. It seemed as though it had fused to his palm. An occasional spark of lightning fell to the ground.  
  
He held out a gloved hand to Sally. Rotor grabbed a handful of the quills on his back. She slipped her furry palm inside Sonic's glove, and then world became a blur.  
  
She would never get used to taking rides with Sonic, no matter how many times she'd done it before. Whenever he started moving, with her in tow, she felt as though the gee forces were trying their best to smash her spine into the soles of her feet.  
  
Because of that momentary disorientation, it took her a moment to notice that the castle doors were already sliding open in front of them. Inviting them.  
  
No, she decided, an instant later. It wasn't inviting them. There were SWATbots on the other side of the door trying to come through - that was the answer. She just couldn't see them because, well, it was difficult to see anything while moving this fast.  
  
The thought barely had time to finish forming in her synapses before they were through the door. Everything was suddenly brightly lit, a sharp contrast to the gloom of outdoors, but Sally had been prepared for that transition. She threw her head back and forth, doing her best to glance at the room before Sonic could suddenly take them anywhere else. A sharp, hot pain near the front of her eyes was her pupils struggling to dilate.  
  
All she could make out was a flash of gunmetal gray, the color of SWATbots, and then searing red of firing gauntlet lasers.  
  
Sally felt a piece of floor exploded dangerously nearby, but thankfully Sonic had already moved away before any debris or shrapnel could hit them. All around, through the speed-blurred vision that was the penalty of traveling with Sonic, she could see more crimson and azure beams. All different kinds of weapons were firing at them. The air was thick with the whine of discharging lasers, and the resultant explosions.  
  
She gritted her teeth. With her free hand, she swung the rifle around until it was facing outward. Wind knocked the barrel around wildly, and she couldn't see what she was aiming at, but it no longer seemed to matter. She jerked her index finger back into the trigger.  
  
The shot fired into the blur. She never saw if she hit anything, she only kept pulling the trigger.  
  
By the time Sonic finally began slowing, the pulse counter on the rifle told her that she had fired over fifteen shots.  
  
They were already in the upper levels of the castle, moving through corridors. Space was tight, and there were several sharp corners. Fortunately, that meant that it would be harder for any nearby SWATbots to draw a bead on them in time. *Unfortunately*, it also meant that if a bead *was* drawn, there was virtually no room to dodge it. Sonic was slowing to a stop because that's precisely what three SWATbots blocking the corridor in front of them were doing.  
  
Without exchanging words, both Sally and Rotor let go of Sonic. He would be free to spindash through the bots without their weight on him. Sally felt momentum carry her forward through the air. She was flying.  
  
Too fast.  
  
Sonic had miscalculated their approach. They were still coming in fast, but not fast enough to avoid the SWATbots' lasers.  
  
Sally wasn't aware of moving. She wasn't even aware of the burning, jerky sensation that accompanied pure reflex motion. Things just happened.  
  
She miraculously landed on her feet, momentum still carrying her towards the SWATbots. She used that sheer kinetic force to swing around the butt of the laser rifle and ram it straight through the head of the first bot. The rifle's nozzle was facing the second SWATbot, and she pulled the trigger. It crumpled to the ground, just in time for her to see Rotor bowl through the third.  
  
Sonic slid to stop, power ring energy still flowing golden through his muscles. "Nice save, guys," he complimented.  
  
"Don't mention iiitttttttttttttttttttt-" she started to say  
  
And they sped off again.  
  
***  
  
Robotnik paced the length of the throne room, occasionally glancing at the vast forward monitor. A floor-by-floor layout of was displayed prominently across several camera feeds. A glowing blue dot represented the current position of the invading Freedom Fighters.  
  
Bunnie watched with a slack jaw, one hand pressed helplessly against the glass prison of the roboticizer tube, the other keeping the Laurentis blade pressed firmly against her fur. She had concealed it inside the belt of her violet jumpsuit.  
  
"They're getting closer, Snively," he glowered. "I want you to be absolutely sure that the trap is ready to spring."  
  
"Barring actually deploying it right now," the lackey unconsciously allowed a dangerous note of disobedience to creep into his voice, "there's not much more I can do, sir. I've checked and double-checked, and the springs are still ready and coiled."  
  
"We've got *one* chance at this." Robotnik alternated between apprehension and anxious glee. "We've got to get the timing *exactly* correct."  
  
"I'll do my best, s-"  
  
"You'll do it right or not at all!"  
  
Bunnie barely heard the conversation. She just stared at the tactical display, and the blue blip, whispering under her breath for them to run away. Her hand tightened on the handle of the hidden blade.  
  
***  
  
Sonic slowed as they approached the entrance to the roboticization chamber, stopping only to sling a razor-sharp ribbon of power ring energy through the torso of a lone SWATbot. They were charging directly towards the waiting entrance. Voices impeded on the fringes of Sally's hearing, growing quickly louder as they approached.  
  
"Sir, here they come!"  
  
"I can hear them! Snively, get ready-"  
  
They burst into the control room and skidded to a narrow stop just inside the entrance. Everything was in its familiar place. Sally's heart leapt when she saw Bunnie trapped inside the roboticizer's cylindrical glass prison, throwing them a pleading look.  
  
She knew immediately that something was off. With a security breach of this magnitude, the roboticizer chamber should have been overflowing with SWATbots. Instead, aside from Snively and a grinning Robotnik, the room was entirely empty.  
  
Sonic raised the power ring in front of him, letting its power flow his muscles. He growled, leveling it at Robotnik like a weapon.  
  
Everything happened at once.  
  
"Get out of here!" Bunnie cried. Her eyes were fixed on Rotor. "Run, before it's too-"  
  
"Now, Snively!" Robotnik yelled jubilantly.  
  
Something invisible yanked the power ring out of Sonic's hand, and, before any the three Freedom Fighters could react, smashed it against the ground.  
  
Not even with the aid of Nicole's sensors was Sally ever able to find out exactly what material the power rings were comprised of. The only thing she'd ever been able to find out was that the tensile strength of the rings was amazing. They were so completely unlike anything she'd ever seen before that she doubted they could ever be broken.  
  
Yet that was exactly what happened to this one.  
  
Whatever drove it into the ground did so with incredibly force. The power ring splintered and cracked in half, releasing a cascade of golden lightning. The energy abated quickly, and the two halves of the power ring just. died.  
  
Sonic yanked his hand back, yelling a wordless noise of shock.  
  
There was the sound of a door slamming ahead of them, and then again behind them, but Sally could see nothing moving. She started running forward, hoisting the laser rifle and aiming it at the roboticizer control.  
  
She ran abruptly into what felt like a glass wall. Her muzzle hit first, and a sharp crack of pain splintered her senses. She fell awkwardly backwards, landing on her rear end.  
  
"No!" Bunnie screamed.  
  
"Diamond glass barriers in place, sir!" Snively raised his voice, forcing himself to be heard about the sound of Bunnie's horror. "The intruders are trapped!" 


	16. Unraveling

Evening was beginning to fall across the eastern horizon. Though the west was still bright, the travelers moved away from it, and into the spreading darkness. It felt too much they were leaving the sun behind them. Absurd as it was, the sensation that their motions were responsible for the loss of the sun was inescapable.  
  
Dulcy felt as though she'd been flying for a thousand days and nights. Her wings felt like little more than scraps of weak flesh and torn tissue; all of it exhausted beyond endurance. Griff was a dead weight on her back. Sally's insistence for a speedy flight to Robotropolis had taken a lot out of the dragon. She just coasted easily through the air now, most of the time letting the wind currents do the work for her.  
  
It was difficult to believe that only a single day had passed since this chain of events had been sparked. Just this morning, Bunnie had been safe and sound in Knothole. Dulcy remembered passing by her hut just after the sun rose, and seeing her still sleeping. She hadn't thought much of it at the time, but remembering it now just made the image seem so idyllic... and made what was happening to her now just all the more unbearable. Dulcy drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and this time it wasn't entirely exhaustion behind her quaking.  
  
She knew that she had a job to do. Though Griff had stirred back to consciousness minutes ago, he still faded in and out, and needed medical help as soon as possible. Only once that task was done would she be able to curl up into a little ball and weep.  
  
Robotropolis was still a dark blot on the far horizon. The sun was disappearing behind the impenetrable smog. Dulcy glanced at the city and shivered, and pushed her tired wings to take them just a little further away from it.  
  
A mechanical whine made her flinch, but the sound was gone soon, and when she glanced around she could see nothing. Haunted by memories of tales of haunted woods and hover unit patrols, she flew onwards, but not for much longer.  
  
Griff strained his voice to be heard above the rushing wind, but when he spoke it was in a voice not much more audible than a harsh whisper. She clearly understood his tone of voice, though. It was a warning.  
  
He was pointing at something just over Dulcy's massive shoulder. Following his finger, she saw what where the mechanical whine came from.  
  
A small camera orb floated passively several meters away from them, mercilessly tracking their progress. She couldn't tell how long it had been trailing them. The shadowy lens eagerly sucked in all the light that fell across it.  
  
"Oh *no!*"  
  
A quick, instinctive blast of icy breath smashed the offending spy camera to bits. The broken debris fell serenely to the ground. But Dulcy knew that it was already too late. The surveillance system had no doubt already reported them. More orbs, and possibly even hover units, would be dispatched within minutes.  
  
Under ordinary circumstances, Dulcy would have no difficulty evading whatever forces were sent to pursue them. But now exhaustion weighed heavily upon her.  
  
Her wings felt as if they could give no more, and she knew that they would soon fail if she continued to overtax them. Tiredness was becoming a physical force that she could no longer fight.  
  
Gasping for air after the strain of blasting the camera orb, Dulcy knew that there was a good chance that they wouldn't make it. She was in no condition to fight the armada that was surely coming. She and Griff were probably as good as captured.  
  
She could feel the hover units close in on them.  
  
***  
  
"Sal, what happened?"  
  
Sonic's voice was raised high in a note of protest, but he sounded as though he was objecting to the universe itself rather than anybody in particular. He cradled his gloved hand close to his chest. Whatever had ripped the power ring away from him had come very close to taking his wrist along with it.  
  
Sally didn't hold his confusion against him; she beginning to think that the laws of physics themselves were playing unfairly. For no reason she could see, an invisible force had just smashed the power ring out of Sonic's hand, and dashed it to pieces against the floor.  
  
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Robotnik swipe his fist through the air triumphant. She ignored him. Instead, she bent down and picked up the broken half of the power ring that had landed on their side of the invisible barrier.  
  
Yellow energy crackled weakly as she touched it, and then it died entirely.  
  
It was a trap, Sally knew immediately. Robotnik had been waiting for them to come into the roboticization chamber. They were trapped between some kind of barriers, something she couldn't see but could sure feel. Her muzzle still smarted where she had smashed into it. Whatever the substance was, it was strong enough to break a power ring in two.  
  
The tables had turned against them so quickly that it left her head spinning. In less than a second, they're roles had changed from conquering intruders to hapless prisoners.  
  
"*Bunnie!*"  
  
Rotor's cry split the room. His eyes met Bunnie's in the same instant. Each had the same glaze of panic in their eyes. Their mutual terror was accented only by a desperate longing.  
  
"Rotor!"  
  
"Diamond glass barriers locked, sir," Snively repeated, looking up proudly at his uncle. "We have them."  
  
"Yes!" Robotnik exclaimed. "I knew that materials science laboratory would pull its weight some day! I just never imagined it would bring me this much." He turned his attention to the newly captive Freedom Fighters. His cape swept across the room as he did so. "I hope the accommodations suit you all. I certainly put a lot of work into them. This is one of my latest creations. It's called diamond glass. Very much unbreakable."  
  
"'Buttnik, the only thing I know right now is that if you built it, I can break it," Sonic shot back.  
  
"You're welcome to try, hedgehog," Robotnik leered. "I certainly enjoy watching you fall flat on your spines. You have come close to 'breaking' some of my things. but too often you never finish the job. Do you remember the crystal mine? You sabotaged my operations there, but you failed to destroy the facility itself." He tapped the invisible barrier with his metal hand. The only way Sally could tell that he was touching anything was the heavy *thunking* sounds that mimicked his movements. "That's where this comes from. You didn't finish the job then, and now you're paying for it."  
  
Sally paid no attention to his posturing. Instead, she met Bunnie's fretful gaze for a moment. She looked directly into her friend's eyes, and asked her without words if this was worth it. The regret in Bunnie's eyes was enough for her to able to know that she could never bring herself to be angry at her for this. But it wasn't enough to know why she had hid this information in the first place.  
  
If only she had told them about the Laurentis nodule...  
  
And then she pushed the thought forcefully out of her mind. In one smooth, fast movement, Sally swept down, unclipped Nicole from inside her boot, and flipped open the computer. She aimed it at the invisible barrier.  
  
"Nicole, analysis," she ordered.  
  
The result was instantaneous. "MATERIAL EXAMINATION INDICATES CHAIN OF CARBON COMPOUNDS TYPICAL OF DIAMONDS. ADDED ARTIFICIAL METALS, MOSTLY BUCKYFIBER ALLOYS, CREATE PERFECT TRANSPARENCY AND SUPPLEMENT TENSILE STRENGTH."  
  
"Can we break through it?" Rotor asked her.  
  
"THE ENERGY REQUIRED TO DO SO IS BEYOND THE SCOPE OF YOUR PRESENT CAPABILITIES."  
  
"Talk to us in English, Nicole!" Sonic snapped, knocking his uninjured fist against the unseen wall. Robotnik grinned widely at this indication of helplessness.  
  
"MY MAIN HEDGEHOG, FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, DIAMOND GLASS IS INDESTRUCTIBLE. WE ARE TRAPPED."  
  
Without even looking at him, Sally knew that Sonic wouldn't accept a straight 'no'. He was already backing up against the far barrier, and getting ready to rev up into a spin dash. She ducked.  
  
Sonic bounced off the first diamond glass barrier with a painful-sounding *thud*, nearly hitting Sally on his landing. He fell back, dazed but not defeated. Before either Sally or Rotor could say anything, he revved back up into a spin and slammed himself into the boundary behind him. It was just as unbreakable as the other. True to Robotnik's words, Sonic fell flat on his quills.  
  
A darkly sonorous laugh echoed through the chamber.  
  
Sally let the laser rifle clatter to the ground beside her. It was useless now. If even Sonic couldn't break through, she knew that they'd have to find some way besides physical force to fight Robotnik. But she couldn't think of anything.  
  
There were no computer consoles within the tiny space they were trapped inside. Nothing conveniently placed for them to hack through; no easy access to the computer that controlled the diamond glass prison. The only way to get to the cage's controlling mechanism was to be outside it.  
  
Snively stood there now, tapping button at the same console that controlled the roboticizer. So the cage walls were using the same circuit as the roboticizer. It was potentially useful information, but Sally didn't see how she could use it from where she was. The only person outside this inescapable prison was Bunnie herself. and she had problems of her own. The walls of the roboticizer's tube were just as unyielding to her metal punch as the diamond glass was to Sonic's spin.  
  
Bunnie stared fearfully at her friends. Though her fur was dripping with sweat, her body was wracked by shivering.  
  
Helpless fury boiled in Bunnie's veins, while stark terror brushed wintry skeletal fingers across her bone marrow. Her robotic limbs throbbed painfully - regardless of how impossible that was for pieces of metal that lacked nerves of their own - as though they remembered the last time they had been in this same booth.  
  
Her heart was pounding, and her gut burned. Fire ants danced inside the interior of her ribcage. She felt as though she was going to die before Robotnik could even activate the roboticizer.  
  
And something about her mind was not quite right.  
  
Whether it had been the barrage of stun bolts, a side-effect of the pain of Robotnik's mistreatment of her, or simple hysteria, she was never able to tell. She knew that her mind was starting to play tricks on her. She was beginning to hallucinate.  
  
What she saw was her mind's own induced madness. Colors began to become exaggerated, and then flow across her vision like a river. Memories, either ancient and nearly forgotten, or fresh and new, assaulted her, playing across her pupils and eardrums as though they were taking place in the present. She knew in the core of her mind that what she saw wasn't real, that she was really standing shock-still in the roboticizer tube, but that knowledge didn't chase the phantoms away.  
  
She thought immediately of the old cliché about one's life passing before the eyes, just before death; but this was something else. This was different. These were nightmares, but beyond the ghouls lay a message. Something her subconscious was trying to tell her, if only she could fight her way past the armada of horrors and sorrows in these visions.  
  
***  
  
*she*was*flying*the*hover*car*again - still*through*the*tunnels*of*Lower*Mobius - she*knew*that*this*memory*wasn't*real -- could*see*reality*and*the*roboticizer*behind*the*memory*but*the*vision*was*n o*less*vivid*or*no*less*real-- the*sun-- the*crystal*was*dying*violently*  
  
The world turned white behind her, deathly silent for an eerie moment.  
  
A wave of sound slammed into the hover car like a physical blow, jets of livid hot air suddenly and temporarily overwhelming the air resistance of the car's motion. Bunnie's ears unconsciously folded in on top of each other, trying to shut out the horrendously loud noise. The car tilted forward, shoved along by the explosion's turbulence. Bunnie tried desperately to right it again, just barely keeping the car from smashing itself to pieces on the tunnel floor.  
  
Lower Mobius incinerated itself.  
  
***  
  
The flashback faded but the madness didn't subside. Robotnik seemed to swim through a sea of dark color, always moving towards the glass cage of the roboticizer tube. A terrible, gloating grin was frozen solid on his face. Behind him, Bunnie could see her three friends trapped helplessly between the two diamond glass barriers. She couldn't help but think about how badly she'd let them down.  
  
"And you, rabbit," the tyrant said, audible somewhere at the fringes of her hearing. "Just when you'd been convinced that you'd won. You actually thought that this would end with just *your* roboticization. You have been mine these two long years; you never stood a chance of escape. Regardless of how long you'd managed to delay this, you were my prisoner in those metal arms and legs of yours. No matter how far you traveled, you always stayed in their cage. With that transmitter in you, you were always mine."  
  
She tried to shake her head clear of the phantasms and hallucinations, to no avail. She hated the idea that she was going mad just before the end. She despised it with a vengeance, with a passion, and would have done anything to chase the specters away and at least die sane. It was bad enough that she was an invalid in body; she didn't want to be one in mind as well. She didn't need another illness.  
  
Robotnik's gloved hands loomed out of the ocean of hallucinations, latching themselves onto the outside of the glass cage with suddenness that made her leap backwards. "You were always going to end up here, but it was so kind of you to bring me your friends at the same time. It was almost worth the delay. You've betrayed your friends, rabbit. You've sold them out to try and run away your fate. And you've brought them here to me. They'll share your fate, now. Tell me, rabbit, how does it feel to know that you've destroyed everyone you care about most?"  
  
Bunnie threw a desperate gaze sideways, towards the diamond glass prison. Rotor had his hands pressed against the invisible barrier. His expression was severe, and overflowing with helpless terror. And then more memories ambushed her senses-  
  
***  
  
*in*the*hover*car*but*in*worse*trouble -*the*prospect*of*imminent*death*forcing*absolute*honesty*with*Rotor - before*he's*gone  
  
"AH LOVE YOU!"  
  
The eject toggles were patterned in a series of four buttons, arranged in a square-shaped pattern. Bunnie slammed two fingers into the buttons that matched Rotor and Griff's seats, and pressed them down with all the effort she could muster.  
  
The last thing she saw of Rotor was his eyes wide open in shock.  
  
***  
  
Rotor's palms were still quashed flat against the diamond glass barrier hemming him and the others in. It was difficult to see them. They kept swimming in and out of her field of view. Distressed shadows, that the core of her mind knew didn't really exist, hid them from view, masking or sometimes even distorting their faces.  
  
Right now, though, Rotor's expression was crystal clear. It showed a clear astonishment, as if she'd just voiced some dark secret.  
  
Surprisingly, the same expression was on Robotnik's face as he backed away from the roboticizer tube. He looked as though Bunnie had just yelled the last thing that he'd ever expected to hear from her. But she had no memory of ever saying anything. For a moment she thought she'd accidentally revealed the hidden Laurentis blade, but that was still tucked safely away in her jumpsuit's belt.  
  
Then she realized that words were indeed still on her lips. When that flash of memory had overcome her, she had unwittingly shouted aloud to Rotor the same words she'd said to him as his seat had ejected from the hover car. In the middle of Robotnik's relentless questioning, she'd just screamed to Rotor that she loved him.  
  
That would certainly explain everyone's stunned faces, she thought. Even Snively was looking up from the roboticizer controls, his right eyebrow slanted upwards.  
  
Sonic and Sally were looking at Rotor with slack jaws and wide eyes. Because of the direction of Bunnie's gaze, they knew exactly who she was talking to. This was clearly news to them, enough so that their surprise temporarily overruled the urgency of their situation.  
  
Bunnie thought she heard Rotor whisper something, but a combination of distance and hallucination made it difficult to understand. She thought she heard him say, voice quiet and morose, "You too."  
  
Sonic and Sally clearly weren't the only ones in the room taken aback by this. Robotnik had been caught off-guard, and for an instant looked as though he was at a loss for what to do next. Then malice returned to his face, and Bunnie instantly regretted saying anything at all. He grinned portentously at her, and then swiveled around to face the other three Freedom Fighters.  
  
Robotnik knew enough about the Freedom Fighters to know about more than a few romances among them. He always tried to take advantage of them. The 'replicant' incident had been geared to appeal to Sonic's love for Sally. Occasionally, the city streets echoed with falsified microphone recordings of either Sonic or Sally crying for help. Robotnik was obviously hoping that one of them would fall for the bait and come rushing the rescue. Once he almost succeeded in capturing Antoine through a similar trap. Only the fact that the real Sally appeared around a street corner a moment later had kept him from running straight out into the trap.  
  
This would be no different, Bunnie knew. Because she had given away what she herself had only recently come to acknowledge, she'd played right into his hands.  
  
Only this time, Robotnik wasn't trying to capture them. He was only going to use this to inflict as much pain as possible. To drive another spike of torment into them. He could never see love, especially this love, as anything more than a tool. Cruelty gleamed in his eyes.  
  
"You two love-" he started, and then cut himself short. "Oh, I don't believe this. This is too perfect." He leaned in towards Rotor, once again showing off his perverse tendency to try and understand the suffering of his victims. "Well, *lover*, how does it feel to know that your sweetheart is the one responsible for your undoing?"  
  
The walrus withdrew his hands from the diamond glass barrier, staring unflinchingly up at Robotnik. "We may be here because of her, Robotnik, but I'll never forget who's ultimately the criminal here. You're the monster who's done all this to her, to us, to everybody here. Yeah, I love her-" he was interrupted by the sudden sound of an alarm on Snively's console, but a moment later continued, talking above the sound of the siren, "-and no matter what you do, you can't take that away from us."  
  
There was no mumbling, or any indication of Rotor's usual hesitant and self- conscious nature. She had never heard him talk like that before. Occasional hallucinations still pried from the corner of her subconscious, but right now her vision was entirely clear.  
  
His expression was the essence of defiance, but next Robotnik's massively powerful form from behind his prison's walls, he looked so terribly vulnerable even as he stood up to him. The sudden flash of fear in his eyes as Snively's alarm went off revealed just how scared he really was. Bunnie's heart went out to him.  
  
Distracted by the alarm, but still intent on his captives, Robotnik turned to face his lackey. "Snively, what is that noise?" he asked, with a threatening undercurrent in his tone.  
  
"I think you'll be very pleased by this, sir," Snively answered. Whenever he dared answer so boldly when Robotnik used that tone of voice, that generally meant that what he had to report was very good news indeed. "Our camera orb surveillance system has located the dragon and another Freedom Fighter above the Great Forest."  
  
Robotnik's displeasure quickly turned into jubilant delight; the Freedom Fighters' curiosity became stark horror. Sally, Sonic, and Rotor were instantly against the walls of their diamond glass cage. Bunnie's hallucinations took Snively's announcement as a cue to redouble their efforts to tear apart her consciousness. A thousand new ghosts and demons surged into her vision.  
  
"The incident in the cavern city has reduced the number of available hover unit patrols, but we still have enough to take them. The dragon isn't putting up much of a fight. All available units are vectoring to intercept."  
  
Robotnik studied the monitors, which were invisible from Bunnie's angle. Moving light played across his features, casting severe shadows across the lines on his face. Through Bunnie's eye, it seemed as through every crack, every shadow, was grinning wickedly.  
  
"It all comes crashing down," he said, shuddering with pleasure. "The decaying 'Freedom Fighters' network is collapsing. Their underground city is annihilated. The Knothole Freedom Fighters are finally done for. I don't even need to bother searching for that wretched village anymore; there are only a few stragglers left there now. Everything I ever wanted I have right here.  
  
"And the thread that unraveled it all is right here," Robotnik continued, looking back up at Bunnie. "That transmitter in your metal leg. Your roboticized limbs. That metal is the only thing of beauty in all your despicable meat and flesh. I think it's about time we disposed of that worthless fur and fleshy tissue, and made it pure machine."  
  
The pattern always went like that. Bunnie had seen the tyrant act like this a thousand times before, and knew the next stage by heart.  
  
Robotnik's gloating suddenly had a much more dangerous edge to it. His bragging was nearing its conclusion, and he was finally ready to begin acting on his words. He had let his victims wallow in fear of what was going to happen next, and was preparing to now begin inflicting as much pain as possible. As predictable as the transition was, she was hard- pressed to think of anything that terrified her more.  
  
The hallucinations made seeing difficult once again, but she confronted the nightmares long enough to at least delay the next onset of panic.  
  
Again came the impression that the dream-like images had meaning, and that her subconscious was trying to tell her something. The feeling was fleeting, though, and she was left with no clue of what the message, if anything, could be.  
  
"Go ahead an' roboticize me," she said, letting Rotor's earlier defiance seep strength into her words. "Because Ah'm all you'll get. All you've done is trap my friends; y'all can't do anythin' to 'em when they're in there. Ya have to open the cage to get at 'em. And once that cage is open they'll bust out, and they'll beat you."  
  
Judging by the wide grin that immediately appeared on Robotnik's face, it had been the wrong thing to say. She had just inadvertently drawn attention to them. Even Snively was smirking slightly.  
  
"Oh no?"  
  
She had to do everything in her power to keep her friends from getting any worse trouble. They were in bad enough shape as it was, and all of this was her fault alone. She tried to turn his attention back to her. "Just roboticize me and get it ovah with! Y'all won, ya got me, now just finish the job!"  
  
Her effort was to no avail. Robotnik leered at her, seeing straight through her ploy, and then gestured at the diamond glass barrier. "You, more than anyone, should know that I like to see my enemies suffer before I finish them. And one of your many weaknesses is empathy. Whenever your friends suffer, you suffer." Oozing faux gallantry, he said, "I wouldn't dream of ending your life without letting you watch them die first. And now that I know certain things..."  
  
Then his expression hardened. His cape whirled through the air as he turned to face his nephew. "Snively, deploy the laser turret!"  
  
Snively nodded briefly, and struck a button on his control panel. The diamond glass cage reverberated with the sound of moving mechanical gears.  
  
A piece of ceiling above the trapped Freedom Fighters peeled backwards. Bunnie felt her hopes sink even lower as she watched. Slowly, a deadly- looking laser barrel appeared from inside the shadow of the newly opened crevice. The majority of the weapon was hidden above the ceiling, but Bunnie could tell that it was very powerful military-grade weapon.  
  
It was clearly designed to execute whatever prisoners got caught inside the diamond glass cage.  
  
It was well out of reach of the three people trapped within. Bunnie heard her friends gasp; felt her own sharp intake of breath get caught inside her throat. She felt her heart stop beating.  
  
Robotnik's eyes were fixed on one person inside the cage. He shook his head slowly, letting them wait in awful apprehension. At last, he turned to Bunnie, and said, "It was a mistake to let me know that you'd fallen for that walrus."  
  
Rotor backed away from the cage screen, wide eyes looking helplessly upwards at the laser turret. Whatever display of courage he'd shown before had completely evaporated now. He trembled, and sweat pooled on his forehead. There was no more hiding behind a veneer of defiance; he was desperately afraid.  
  
Robotnik leveled his index finger at Rotor's chest.  
  
Coldly, he ordered, "Kill that one." 


	17. Immolation

Author's note: Yes, yes, delays and more delays. If I told you that the reason for this wait was because I'd written a novel between the pages of "The Laurentis Countdown", I don't suppose you'd believe me, would you? No, I suppose not. ;)  
  
On another note, I would like to thank everyone who's been harassing me to get this done. I deserved all the haranguing I got for waiting for so many months.  
  
***  
  
A shaft of solid azure light stretched down from the ceiling. If it hadn't been so deadly, the light show might have been called beautiful.  
  
The bolt burned straight through the sash on Rotor's shoulder, and began searing the flesh underneath.  
  
Rotor howled in pain, and reflexively leapt away from the laser beam. The turret stopped firing as it lost its target. Understandably unaware of where he was stumbling, he smashed into the diamond glass screen in mid- stride. His shoulder was blackened, the soft tissue underneath charred and peeled. Once the laser stopped firing, he clamped his mouth and screwed his eyes up in pain.  
  
Sonic and Sally instinctively backed away from the blast. Sally bent down to pick something up; or she could have just stumbled. Bunnie's eyes were on Rotor, and the turret that was about to end his life. She could only watch with the slack jaw.  
  
The turret lined up another shot, this time drawing a bead directly on Rotor's head.  
  
A laser fired.  
  
The bolt flew away from the tip of Sally's laser rifle, and smashed into the turret's barrel. The shot wasn't very powerful, but it was enough to dent the armor, and seal the nozzle of the turret's barrel.  
  
When the turret fired, the blast smashed into its own barrel, and the turret blew itself apart in a burst of smoke and a hail of debris. It wouldn't be firing again any time soon. A shower of sparks rained down on the cage's inhabitants.  
  
Rotor collapsed to his knees, and then curled into a fetal position on the ground, cradling his shoulder wound. Bunnie couldn't see much from her vantage point, but it was obvious that the laser had burned deep.  
  
Sally lowered her laser rifle, and rushed to Rotor's side.  
  
On the other side of the diamond glass cage, Robotnik's grin had quickly turned to snarl. Whirling to face his nephew, he exploded. "*WHAT* just happened?"  
  
"The Princess fired on the turret!" Snively said, checking and double- checking his monitors. He nearly choked in panic as he read the displays. "I'm sorry, sir, the weapon's been completely disabled! We won't be able to get it back online without a full repair team."  
  
"I want them dead! All of them!" Robotnik swerved back towards their cage, and slammed his gloved fists against the invisible wall. For now, though, the same diamond glass barrier that kept the Freedom Fighters trapped also protected them from Robotnik's wrath.  
  
Bunnie found herself crying in relief when Rotor moved again. He wasn't dead, just badly hurt.  
  
Sonic and Sally kneeled over the prone walrus, helping him protect the wound. Sally did her best to stop whatever bleeding hadn't been cauterized by the laser's burn, while Sonic glared fiercely up at Robotnik. A fury the likes of which Bunnie hadn't seen in over two years burned in the hedgehog's eyes.  
  
"One day we're gonna do all of this right back at you, Robuttnik!" Sonic cried. "Right back at you! You're gonna hurt just as much as we are!"  
  
Robotnik ignored him, instead fuming, "There has to be some other way we can kill them from here!"  
  
In a tone of voice that made him sound as though he were pleading for his life, Snively said, "We don't have any more equipment inside the barriers, sir! I'm afraid we can't!"  
  
With a gentle touch, Sally slowly moved Rotor until he was sitting on his knees. She was careful not to let anything touch the sensitive wound. Empathy seemed to guide her every movement. She looked every bit as sympathetic as Bunnie felt.  
  
Rotor's eyes were still squeezed shut, but occasionally a tear slipped the slit between his lids.  
  
Robotnik stalked over to a depression in the wall, and grabbed a laser rifle from a waiting rack. For a moment, he looked as though he was getting ready to open the cage and shoot them himself. Then he reconsidered, set the rifle back, and growled. "Maybe I'll just have to let them starve to death in there!"  
  
Occasionally, a feeble shower of sparks still sprayed from the broken laser turret. Sally brushed them off her fur, and together she and Sonic moved Rotor away from underneath it.  
  
There was nothing more that could hurt them in there, but the situation was still out of their hands. The combination of the turret's destruction, and the indestructibility of the diamond glass, had simply removed them from the field of play. They may as well not even be there. They were helpless witnesses to what was about to pass.  
  
Bunnie let out a long breath, feeling as though she hadn't exhaled in a lifetime. Rotor was still alive. She would have collapsed inside the roboticization tube if there had been enough room. Instead, she only leaned limply against one side of the cramped tube. Her neck craned back as she did so, and, quite by chance she caught a glimpse of the roboticizer machine waiting silent above her.  
  
Her fur prickled.  
  
She, unlike her friends, was not outside the field of play. Though she was caged like the others, she was not so impervious to Robotnik's fury. The instrument of death here wasn't a turret, but instead the roboticizer itself.  
  
She remembered when she had stood in this same place, two years ago. Staring up into the machinery, her senses were overcome by another flashback. This one had more force, though, and the sensation that her subconscious was trying to tell her something became much stronger. There was a message somewhere in these hallucinations.  
  
***  
  
*her*life*was*about*to*end-- *only*fourteen*-- *the*tyrant*had*just*opened*her*leg*-- *done*something*to*the*Laurentis*nodule*with*the*glowing*blade  
  
Bunnie caught a glimpse of a cylindrical object, perched among the wiring and hydraulics of her right leg, glowing with the same blue color, before he snapped the panel shut again.  
  
"Very well, Snively. We're ready to begin phase 2."  
  
The roboticizer snapped shut once more. It was happening, again. She was going to be roboticized, this time for good.  
  
"Let me double-check the nodule's configuration," she heard Snively say.  
  
"No, Snively, I don't want to wait. Just finish roboticizing this bitch, now."  
  
"Sir, if the nodule isn't properly configured, the feedback loop could destroy-"  
  
Alarm sirens punctured the air, without warning.  
  
***  
  
The glowing blade he'd used then was now secreted safely away inside her jumpsuit's belt.  
  
Robotnik turned to her.  
  
"Or maybe I'll just have to let them sit in there while I roboticize their friend," he said. "Rabbit, I hope you're as miserable as possible, because I've really grown tired of inflicting pain on you. I just want you *gone*! Out of my way forever! And now that's finally going to happen."  
  
Bunnie dropped to a crouch, one hand protectively covering the hidden blade. Phantoms still distorted Robotnik's face, but she growled at his frightening visage anyway.  
  
Robotnik paced the length of the roboticization chamber, finally stopping when he reached Snively's console. "Snively, the Laurentis should still be configured to what I set to, two years ago, correct?"  
  
"Yes, sir. I'll double-check that now."  
  
"Good. I don't want any mistakes."  
  
The hallucinations drew her gaze to the computer console Snively was working on. It was the same console he had used to spring the trap that her friends here still snared in. The realization hit her like a slap to the face: the two systems were tied into the same circuit. If one were destroyed... there was a good chance that the other would be, too. If the roboticizer were destroyed, then the diamond glass cage would spring open.  
  
That was what her subconscious, through the hallucinations, was trying to tell her.  
  
Her hand rested sedately on the hilt of the Laurentis blade. There was only one way out of this. There always had been.  
  
She kept her eyes locked on the shiny tip of the blade. She only wished she could drive it through the heart of the man doing this to her. With the glass barrier still in place, though, that was impossible. Her body would have to do instead.  
  
"The rabbit's nodule is properly configured," Snively said. He was still bent over the controls, double- and triple-checking displays even as he spoke. He knew exactly how much of Robotnik's wrath he would catch if he made a mistake here. "All systems are a-go. We're ready to roboticize, sir."  
  
Robotnik was suddenly leering over her. Bunnie was careful not to draw his attention to the object she held in her hand.  
  
He was going to gloat, she knew. He always did. He'd never had enough of it, not even when he was already sure he had the last word.  
  
"Any particular requests for a duty assignment, rabbit?" he asked. "Once you're a workerbot, is there any particular place you'd prefer to work? Any SWATbot factories or smelting plants that've caught your eye?"  
  
Bunnie kept her gaze down to the ground. It wasn't hard to give the appearance of being in total submission. If she kept this up for long enough, it might even be possible to convince him that he'd won already. Well, the truth was that he *had* won already - but just not the way he thought. If she did the wrong thing now, he'd start to get suspicious, and then he'd surely find the blade she'd hidden.  
  
"Don't- don't bother saying anything," Robotnik said. "I already know what your first duty assignment will be. When I open the cage to murder your friends, I think you'll be the robot I'll assign to do to deed."  
  
Whatever tiny shred of rationality left inside her insisted that she continue to act the way Robotnik would expect her to. If she could keep that up, the voice promised soothingly, it would all be over soon and she could finally... rest.  
  
She ran her hands across the blade's surface again, and wondered how that sharp tip would feel when it pierced her.  
  
Her southern sensibilities insisted that, if suicide was inevitable, she should at least do it an as spectacular a way as possible, and do it at a time that would let her life end with a clear conscience.  
  
That last little core of resilience kept the words coming out of her mouth. She almost didn't hear herself say them. She wasn't even sure she even believed them, either. Her only motivation now was to keep Robotnik content with thinking that everything was over. "They won't let a lil' ol' thing lahk me stop them. When they get out, they'll keep fighting you." Robotnik chuckled heartily before she could even finish her last sentence. He'd bought it. So far so good.  
  
Was this what the end was supposed to feel like? This wasn't how Bunnie had imagined it. She'd always thought that the last real decision of her life would feel like it had a bit more meaning than this - like it would be worth more than this. She knew, in a way, it would matter to Sonic and Sally and Rotor, but she had just stopped caring about them. She had been so bombarded with hallucinations and futility and false hopes snatched away at the last second that she could hardly feel anything at all. Only an overwhelming apathy and an urge to rest.  
  
That last core of rationality kept her body in motion just long enough to complete this last task. Then even it would fail.  
  
"Well, we'll just see about that, won't we, rabbit?" Robotnik said.  
  
He raised his hand, index finger towards Snively. The gloved arm hung in the air like a guillotine, ready at last to give the final order. He let it hesitate there for a few seconds, savoring the moment almost as much as he was the expressions on the faces of his captives.  
  
Sonic, Sally, and Rotor all had their hands pressed against the indomitable diamond glass, pushing with all their might. They knew they were helpless to act, but that didn't stop them from trying anyway. Even Rotor seemed to have forgotten about the pain of his shoulder wound.  
  
Bunnie's hand trembled as it gripped the Laurentis blade. Even though this moment had been the subject of nightmares for all her years, there was surprisingly little fear. Fright had been quashed out of existence. There wasn't much point to it when she already knew what the outcome would be. She'd lost. It was as though this moment had already happened, and everything she saw now was only the replay of a rewound tape.  
  
There was only a crushing exhaustion now. She knew that in just a few more moments whatever force kept driving her on would curl up and die. She'd give up whether this was over or not. Just a few more moments...  
  
"Snively-" Robotnik began.  
  
"No!" Sally said, from inside the diamond glass cage. "Don't do this. If- if you let her go, I swear I'll surrender to you. You can have me, Robotnik! Roboticize me instead!"  
  
Robotnik's hand had stopped in mid-air. The corner of his mouth twitched in amusement as he listened. Even Snively, risking life and limb, had allowed his attention to be distracted from his control panels.  
  
"Shut up, Sally," Bunnie said.  
  
"Now that you have us, you don't need her," Sally said. "You have the Freedom Fighters network, she doesn't mean anything more-"  
  
"Shut up, *Sally-girl*!" Bunnie hissed.  
  
Robotnik shook his head with bemusement. He looked back and forth between the two cages for a moment. For a moment, Bunnie thought that his complacency had been broken, and that any minute he would discover the missing Laurentis blade. But instead, he said, "Now, Princess, why would I let one of you go when I quite clearly have all of you already? Honestly, you shouldn't try to make a bargain with a man who already has your life. You don't have anything else to offer me."  
  
Sally opened her mouth to protest again. Why did she have to do that? Why did she have to come so close to keeping Bunnie from taking this one last chance to save their lives? "But-"  
  
"Princess," he interrupted, to Bunnie's relief, "your time is up. The game is over. You lost. I do enjoy all this drama, but sometimes it wears a little thin." Robotnik turned to face his nephew.  
  
Letting his hand fall at last, he said, "Snively, activate the roboticizer!"  
  
Sally cried out in wordless protest. She was ignored. Not even Bunnie paid attention to her. She simply wasn't relevant to the situation any longer.  
  
Snively nodded at his uncle. His fingers danced across the control panels. Power began thrumming throughout the room, centered on the roboticizer chamber in the middle of the room. A small smile crossed Snively's face; he seemed pleased that this was at last drawing to a conclusion he could appreciate.  
  
Somewhere on the fringes of her consciousness she was aware that all three of the other Freedom Fighters were still pounding uselessly against the diamond glass cage. Had she been in an ordinary state of consciousness, she would have felt sympathy for them. Now there was nothing.  
  
Just a few more seconds, she told herself, and then she could rest forever.  
  
With a whirring noise, the machinery above Bunnie's head came to life. Green lightning began flickering through the beam emitters.  
  
It was a terrible color - bright and vivid, fraught with angry energy waiting for just the right opportunity to strike. It lashed about the beam emitters with hungry malice, and looked as though it couldn't stand to wait there for even a few seconds longer. It looked just like it had the last time Bunnie had stood underneath the roboticizer. Her memories of it hadn't been this vivid even in nightmares. In her emotionally-deadened state, Bunnie wasn't able feel frightened by it. Instead, she just watched the beam emitters charge and marveled at the sight.  
  
She had been afraid of that lightning for so long. It had troubled her for so many years: a ghost that haunted her memories. She'd once thought that she'd die of fright if she ever saw it again. Now that she had a chance to examine up close, really close, she could see that there wasn't actually anything to fear.  
  
The energy was a tool. It was just as much a tool as the control panels Snively used to activate it. The lightning didn't have any mind or malice of its own. It just roboticized what it was told to. It was a mindless thing made slave to Robotnik - and with the right amount of tweaking, it could be made to work against him just as easily.  
  
Bunnie stood resolute underneath the roboticizer. She brought the Laurentis blade out from underneath her jumpsuit. It was a risk to reveal it openly, but she was wagering that Robotnik was too busy obsessing over his imminent victory to give much notice to it now. She held it clenched in her right hand, ready to bring the blade down to strike its target in an instant.  
  
Thin red pencils of light swept down from the ceiling of the roboticizer chamber. They were sensor beams. They swept across her body, leaving a slight tingling sensation wherever they passed, and at last settled on the broad portion of her right leg. All of the other scanner beams centered on that point instantly. They had found the roboticizer beam's guide, the Laurentis nodule, and were providing target crosshairs for the beam to follow. If Griff's explanation was accurate, the roboticizer beam would strike the Laurentis nodule first, and from there spread out through the rest of her body.  
  
With it would come the cloying sensation of flesh and fur being warped into shapes - into entirely new elements - that nature had never intended.  
  
For another moment, nothing moved.  
  
A sudden mental image of a funnel passed through her mind. This was the choke point. For the past two years, anything she had ever done in the past all lead inexorably to this moment. Everything that would happen in the future hinged on what she would do here.  
  
The roboticizer beam swept down from the ceiling, and washed across her.  
  
It focused on the hilt of her right leg, exactly where the scanner lights were leading it. There was an electric tingle in her leg. It was the first real sensation she'd felt from down there ever since she was roboticized.  
  
There was a tiny click from within the Laurentis nodule as, after two long years, it finally began to fulfill its ultimate purpose.  
  
Her tailbone and left shoulder began to feel agonizingly cold, as though all the marrow were turning to ice and pushing outward. Brown fur and purple jumpsuit began to meld together. She could feel fur all over her body start to be matted down. She could feel it slick back as it started to transform into sleek, slippery metal. An alien consciousness began to pry at her thoughts. It was cold, aloof and alien. It insisted that she acknowledge Robotnik as her supreme leader. Within a few moments, it would overcome her entirely.  
  
Whenever she tried to remember this moment later, there were only two things she called with any clarity. The first was the pain. The second was the speed at which the next few things happened. For the last defining moment her life, it was over startlingly quickly.  
  
She brought her fist around, glowing blue Laurentis blade was enclosed within her fingers. The tip of the blade pointed directly downward. She hefted the blade up. and slammed it straight through her right leg.  
  
There was a prickling sensation as the blade pierced the leg's metallic skin. Then an incredibly painful shock as the blade stabbed into the guts of the Laurentis nodule. A scarring, burning agony rippled throughout all three of her metallic limbs - a sign that told her that she had succeeded. The nodule was demolished entirely. Her aim with the blade had struck true, and it she had torn the Laurentis nodule entirely asunder.  
  
A slight humming that had reverberated across her subconscious ever since she'd left Lower Mobius faded: the nodule's beacon was silenced.  
  
All sensation from Bunnie's three robotic limbs faded away. They became so dead to her senses that she might as well not have even had them at all. They locked in place and didn't move. It was even worse than if she'd just gone limp. Suddenly, she was just a torso, a head, and a right arm, and all the rest became just dead baggage. She was just a collection of immobile body parts wreathed in the fires of the roboticizer energies.  
  
With the Laurentis nodule gone, and the roboticizer lightning began to diffuse around her. The beam no longer had any guide to direct it. The roboticization process halted. The alien consciousness screamed and was torn away from her mind. She was herself again.  
  
Lightning crackled harmlessly around her. Energy continually streamed in from the emitter in the ceiling above her, but it had no place to go. It collected in a pool on the bottom of the roboticizer cage, unable to escape. The laws of physics told it that it still needed to go somewhere - to strike something - but it was trapped. It strove for release. It tried to absorb itself into Bunnie's body, but without the Laurentis nodule to act as a guide for the roboticization effect, it could accomplish nothing. Her fur rose on end, but otherwise nothing happened to her. The lightning buzzed furiously throughout her cage, growing more anxious by the instant. It was building towards a violent crescendo.  
  
Robotnik and Snively both shielded their eyes from the sudden glare emanating from the roboticizer tube. An insistent whine coming from the roboticizer was growing louder by the moment, and it was enough to drown out most of their words. Only Snively's most urgent alarm managed to pierce the cacophony: "SIR! There's a feedback loop somewhere!"  
  
The energy collecting in the roboticizer tube finally gathered enough strength to decide that it had had enough. It escaped the only way it possibly could: back in the direction it came from.  
  
Bunnie's body briefly glowed of its own accord, and then the trapped energies leapt upward in a single surge. The lightning rode the still- active roboticizer beam like a ladder. It smashed into the roboticizer emitter, and tore it apart. A bright white flash split the air, and the sharp crack of a thunderbolt echoed throughout the chamber. The combined power was far too much for even the roboticizer's capacitors to handle, and at last the feedback loop that Bunnie was promised two years ago happened. The machinery above her burst into a shower of sparks of flames. The roboticizer exploded. The force of the blast broke the glass of the roboticizer tube. A shockwave of white-hot air slammed into her.  
  
Fire raced across the walls and ceiling as the entire room's computer network was overloaded by the blast. Even Snively's control panel was ablaze, and fire and smoke poured out of it even as he wrestled with the controls.  
  
"The circuit grid's overloaded," he said. "I'm losing control over everything!"  
  
Just then, Robotnik reached the same conclusion Bunnie had moments earlier. "Seal the diamond glass cage! It's on the same circuit as the roboticizer! Quickly, Snively, lock it!"  
  
Snively reached across the panel with his right hand. Before his fingers could touch a single control, the entire console exploded. His right hand was engulfed in a sheet of yellow flames. He shrieked, and jerked his hand out of the fire. He held his injured hand to his chest, cradling it and unable to do anything else.  
  
The explosion on his console was the final sign that the circuit had at last overloaded. The diamond glass cage sprung open, and Sonic, Sally, and Rotor each sprung out. There was the distinctive high-pitched whine of Sonic revving up to high speed, and the sound of a laser blast from Sally's rifle. Bunnie didn't see where the laser hit. Her vision was starting to fade to black.  
  
The crumpled roboticizer machinery perched above her head was starting to look dangerously unstable. The power of the overload had nearly destroyed its structure. It would topple over on top of her at any moment. The machine was heavy enough that the impact was sure to be fatal, and with her three robotic limbs now nothing more than dead weight, she couldn't move to avoid it.  
  
Bunnie no longer cared. She was past exhaustion. She had just given up entirely. She knew beforehand that all she had left to do before she could call it quits forever was that one simple task. Now that she had done it - now that the Laurentis nodule was destroyed - she could give in to the numbing fatigue and just die.  
  
As the fires and the battle raged around her, she shut her eyes.  
  
The last thing she heard before succumbing to the darkness was the agonized shriek of tormented metal of the machinery as it collapsed down on top of her...  
  
***  
  
TO BE CONCLUDED. 


	18. Consequences

It was Sonic who dragged her away from the collapsing roboticizer. She only learned this later, of course. At the time, she couldn't feel anything at all.  
  
***  
  
So it was done with. The Laurentis nodule, and its blaring beacon, had been extinguished, and with it any hope that Bunnie would ever be able to use her robotic limbs again.  
  
The thoughts crept through her mind like dripping molasses. Where and when she thought them, she didn't know. She didn't have the presence of mind to even ask herself that. She was mired in eternal blackness. Unconscious, yet at least able to think to herself about some things; almost like a dream. For all she knew, each one of her thoughts could have taken over an hour of real time to actually connect across her neurons. She didn't know where she was, and she didn't really care, either. That she could even have a physical body at this point was a concept that never occurred to her.  
  
Bunnie had finally done what she'd gone to Robotropolis to do in the first place: plucked the Laurentis nodule right out of her leg.  
  
She never forgot what Griff had told her in the doomed city of Lower Mobius. Ordinarily, removing the nodule like that should have provoked an overload strong enough to kill her, but the glowing edge of the Laurentis blade had kept that from happening. It was the tool Griff originally intended to use to interface with the nodule. When the blade glowed, it transmitted instructions to the nodule to gently shut down. It allowed its possessor to adjust the nodule without running the risk of a fatal overload.  
  
Instead of adjusting the nodule, though, Bunnie had used the blade to obliterate it entirely.  
  
In addition to hosting the beacon, the nodule also housed the power distribution processor for all three of her robotic limbs. It distributed energy from her power supply to the motors that controlled the movement of her metal legs and arm. Without the processor, there were no motors and no movement. She couldn't move her left arm or either of her legs.  
  
She wasn't just a freak and an outcast anymore. She was triplegic. She was a cripple, and she was useless to the Freedom Fighters.  
  
Though she certainly didn't deserve his attentions, she'd have to ask Rotor to uninstall all three robotic limbs with this was over. That way, she'd at least be able to crawl and scratch through what remained of her life without having to deal with the extra burden of those three useless limbs.  
  
That was, she'd have to ask him, if she survived. She didn't know where she was or if she still breathed. Griff hadn't sounded too certain when he said that she'd survive without the Laurentis nodule, even if the proper shut-down signal had been transmitted via the blade. If the rest of her body was metallic, certainly she wouldn't have survived. Her heart would have been shut down, and so would her brain. She had a living heart and a free mind, though, and that had been what had kept them from shutting down with the nodule's destruction. Yet there were still tangential variables that gave her pause. It was quite possible that she hadn't survived. She knew blood pumped through her metallic legs and arm (the veins sealed themselves whenever one of her limbs was removed) but she didn't know if it would cease flowing entirely once the limbs themselves had been deactivated by the nodule's demise. A deactivated limb could stop blood flow in just the wrong fashion. Veins blocked or sealed improperly would leak. It would've been exactly like bleeding to death. All of her efforts to save herself could've bought her nothing more than an extra few minutes of a slow, gasping death; laying in a congealing pool of her own blood at the floor of the roboticizer chamber.  
  
Ordinary, these thoughts would have given her cause to shudder and feel nauseous. She didn't have the temperament fit to handle such hideousness for long. They felt right at home now, though. The past few hours had been nothing more than an unending stream of it. She felt like she was a different person than the one she'd woken up as this morning.  
  
A worse person.  
  
***  
  
"Monitoring electrical output; voltage, amperage, steady."  
  
A beat.  
  
"No reaction from her nervous system."  
  
"Check. Increase battery output. Decrease the variable resistance by another twenty ohms."  
  
"I thought we'd already hit the bottom."  
  
"No, we can lower it a little more. I wasn't sure we could before, but the walrus showed me how. Go ahead and do it."  
  
"The machine isn't letting me."  
  
"Here, let me show you: increase fluid salinity by about another three parts per thousand. That'll help it carry more amperage."  
  
"That could have adverse effects on her nervous system, doctor."  
  
Another beat.  
  
"Negligible. Do it."  
  
A wrenching pain forced a gasp from Bunnie's lungs, bursting straight through the fog of semi-consciousness. Her muscles involuntarily spasmed. She twisted on her back, fighting the strong hands that were suddenly holding her down... wherever she was. This is what she imagined that stabbing through her leg should have felt like - a blunt, brutal knife sawing through entire nerve clusters.  
  
"Definitely an adverse reaction!"  
  
Bunnie flopped uselessly on her back, unable to bear so much pain. Karma had finally caught up with her; she'd landed in a torturous and eternal afterlife.  
  
"Let it ride its course. It shouldn't last long."  
  
Almost as soon as the voice spoke, the pain began to subside. Bunnie felt herself relax back into the cushions of whatever surface she'd been laying on. The jolt of pain had forced her to collect enough of her senses to realize that it felt like a cot.  
  
"Breathe easy, honey," Bunnie felt a hand brush off some of the sweat that had collected on the fur on her forehead. "Just breathe easy."  
  
"I think... it worked," the other voice said. "We did it. She's conscious, too. What's her spinal EEG look like?"  
  
"Her artificial nervous system showed a definite reaction. We strained her batteries, but her power supply is steady."  
  
"EKG?"  
  
"Her heart rate's fast, but it's slowing to normal. She's out of it now."  
  
Bunnie wasn't a doctor; she had no idea what the two voices were talking about. It took her a moment of consideration to even realize that they were talking about the conditions of her health.  
  
"The saline solution was a little rough on her, but it was just the jump- start she needed," a third voice joined the other two. "Good job."  
  
Bunnie's eyes fluttered open, and against the burning glare of midday light streaming in through the windows, she saw two Mobians she didn't recognize. One was male, the other female. The third voice, the one that had been ordering the other around, was coming from outside of her field of view.  
  
The male asked, "Would you like a sedative? We didn't expect you to come out of it right now. The pain was probably a little much. You don't have to stay with us if you don't want to."  
  
The pain was no longer an obstacle. Most of it had faded anyway. Feebly, Bunnie shook her head.  
  
"Ordinarily, this is when I'd start closing her up," the distant voice said. "But this is far beyond my ken. This calls for a mechanic, not a doctor. Isolde, if you please?"  
  
The female looked back at Bunnie for a hesitant moment, and then pulled back. "Of course, doctor." She snapped a thick rubber glove over her right hand. Bunnie saw that a great deal of the glove had already been covered with the thick, dark grime of motor oil. Bunnie's first impression of her had been that she was a nurse. Of course she wasn't, though; who'd ever want a nurse when dealing with the likes of Bunnie? This woman was a mechanic.  
  
Bunnie heard the noises of metal scraping against metal as the woman dug around in the guts of her mechanical leg. Then there was a pause, followed by the squeak of an poorly-oiled hinge, and the clang of an access panel closing shut.  
  
The fact that she didn't recognize either of the Mobians she had seen was really starting to unnerve her. Even though the Freedom Fighters network had grown in size recently, for most of her life she'd lived in socially restrained conditions, where always she'd known everyone she'd ever interacted with and seeing new faces had been rare, at the very least. As such, she hadn't been raised to be very sociable around strangers.  
  
"Who... who are y'all? Ah don't recognize yah..."  
  
"We're from Lower Mobius," the as-yet-unknown male said. He was examining computer-generated images on a display monitor mounted by Bunnie's side. "Don't worry, you're safe here."  
  
"Lower Mobius!" Bunnie tried to struggle to a sitting position, but was held back by the male's arms. It was probably just as well, too. Blood began rushing through inflamed veins in her temples at the slightest motion, resulting in a supremely powerful headache. "But I thought that-"  
  
"Like I said, you're safe now," the male explained smoothly. He rattled off detail after detail very calmly. "We're not in Lower Mobius right now, of course. We're inside one of our emergency ambulance hover vehicles. We're with the rest of the convoy that evacuated the city, just parked out underneath the cover of some shrubs out in the Great Plains. The hover vehicles are still our best shelter out here."  
  
"But how did I get out here?"  
  
"Your friends brought you here," he said. "As well-equipped as you Knothole folks are, you still don't have any full time doctors on call. We do."  
  
"So, Sonic and Sally... and Rotor, they're all safe?" Bunnie asked, wide- eyed.  
  
"Yes," he answered, smiling. "They're all still here with us. So is Griff, and the dragon that brought him here."  
  
Bunnie fell limply back into the bunk cushions, feeling tension cascade out of her shoulders. Her life was over - whether she was physically alive here in this hospital or not - but at least it had ended on a good note.  
  
After a quiet moment, the doctor said, "You took a mighty shock to your system. Standing partially inside a roboticizer beam was bad enough, but you tried to use a knife to play around with your physiology the painful way. With the way you're... um... hardwired, messing around with that nodule was almost as much of a shock to you as, say, doing the same thing to your heart would've been." He slipped a pill into her left hand. "Here, take this, it'll help cushion your system's response."  
  
Bunnie froze. For a long time, she wasn't entirely sure what had just happened.  
  
After she didn't do anything for a moment, the doctor said, "Well, are you going to take it? You don't have to if you don't want to, but I'd recommend that you do; otherwise you'll be extremely uncomfortable soon." Bunnie didn't pay him any attention.  
  
The doctor had placed the pill into her left hand.  
  
She had *felt* it.  
  
Slowly, expecting the metallic mass of her roboticized left arm to coil up and strike her like a snake, she turned her head and stared at it. The pill was right in the palm of her hand, exactly where she had felt it.  
  
Her metal fingers curled around the pill as she ordered them to do so.  
  
"Ah don't understand..."  
  
"Well," the doctor started explaining, "the pill will help your body regulate the receptor chemicals in the autonomic areas of your brain: the areas that control your breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, and so on. The disruption from removing one of your roboticized leg's artificial glands disrupted-"  
  
So she was either dreaming or this was the afterlife.  
  
"Not... the pill..." she hissed, teeth clenched. The doctor started at the sudden aggressive change in her tone. "Ah... mean mah arm."  
  
He stepped in front of Bunnie, and for the first time, she saw his face.  
  
"What about it?" he asked. "Is something wrong? If there is, I can call another mechanic down here, quick, and--"  
  
The name spilled out of Bunnie's mouth before she could help it.  
  
"Thaddeus!"  
  
A fresh bandage was wrapped around the buck's head, but otherwise he looked much better than the last time Bunnie had seen him. He must've had access to the time and the facilities to bathe, because most of the blood had been washed out of his fur. He looked almost nothing like that sad, crumpled body Bunnie had hauled out from underneath the wreckage of a Lower Mobius cabin.  
  
Thaddeus - Doctor Thaddeus - gave her a quizzical stare. He was silent for a moment, and then said, "Did someone tell you my name?"  
  
"Don't... Don't ya recognize me?"  
  
He shook his head. Of course he didn't recognize her, she realized a moment later. He had been unconscious the entire time they'd been together before. She scolded herself to think next time.  
  
Bunnie let it go. She knew that if she told this man what she'd done for him, he'd try to thank her, and she didn't feel worthy of any praise right now.  
  
"Just do me a favor, and ask Gail next time ya see her."  
  
Thaddeus looked even more confused upon the invoking of his wife's name, but he sensed that his patient didn't want to talk about it anymore, and obliged her. Besides, he seemed to have other things on his mind.  
  
"I was told that the damage to your leg was self-inflicted," he said. "Is this true?"  
  
"Yeah... Ah suppose." Bunnie said it reluctantly, because she wasn't sure whether she had had any choice in the matter. "Wut about mah legs? How are they workin'-?"  
  
"Well, you took a very foolish risk," he interrupted. "Your knife sliced right through the object that was your leg's power distribution node. Without that node, no power could be distributed to anywhere in your robotic limbs. You almost lost them."  
  
Bunnie stared at him in bewilderment, wondering why he felt he had to explain this to her. Then it struck her that he knew nothing about what had happened. He actually thought that she didn't know about the Laurentis nodule. He didn't think that she had even meant to destroy it.  
  
"It was a very rare and meticulously assembled object, built to handle thousands of minute power flow adjustments per second," Thaddeus continued, oblivious. "There was nothing that would even remotely serve as a backup in stock. We thought you'd lose the use of both your legs and your arm when your friends brought you to us. We only had one other object that could regulate a power flow that complex, and we thought it had been destroyed with the power crystal in Lower Mobius.  
  
"Fortunately, Dirk scavenged it before it blew... he was the one who suggested this, you know. Have you met him?" When Bunnie nodded, 'yes', dumbfounded, he went on. "I can show you what he did, if you want."  
  
He helped her up into a sitting position (working arms and legs or no, she still felt terribly weak), and then he indicated the panel on her right leg. The panel was scarred, of course, with the gash Bunnie had torn into it with the blade, but some clever mechanic had welded shut the worst of the damage. Underneath the panel was the space where the Laurentis nodule had been. Thaddeus flipped the panel open.  
  
Bunnie blinked against the glare, nearly blinded by the light source. She raised her mechanical arm to shield her eyes.  
  
The light source was the broken half of the Power Stone, formerly of the Knothole grotto, then the Lower Mobius power crystal, and now embedded firmly inside her leg.  
  
***  
  
The scar would never fade, of course. Metal didn't heal or regenerate, and the medical team didn't want to risk replacing too many of her parts. The gash that the Laurentis blade had torn, and the scar of the welding that had sealed it shut, would stay on her leg for as long as she'd kept it.  
  
The reason Thaddeus and the other medtechs didn't want to replace that leg panel was the same reason that worried them sick about replacing the destroyed nodule with the power stone. And that was deroboticization. The nodule and the panel both had originally been parts of her body, once, even when she was flesh and blood. When she'd been roboticized, her real limbs had just been changed - they hadn't been replaced. Ergo, the scarred panel and the Laurentis nodule both were just as much a part of her as they had been they day she'd been roboticized.  
  
The deroboticization process was just a simple reversal of the original deroboticization. If the nodule and the panel had been a part of her when she was first roboticized, it was possible that to deroboticize her, she'd need to have them. The Laurentis nodule had been permanently destroyed; there was no recovering it.  
  
The medtechs weren't sure she'd ever be able to be deroboticized now.  
  
Nothing was certain, but logically it made sense. The panel scar was bad enough. From everything that was known about the deroboticization process, if she tried it with that panel like it was right now, a gash of similar size would probably appear on her flesh-and-blood leg afterwards. Welding scars and all.  
  
That might have been tolerable, but the missing Laurentis nodule was something else. The matter that had composed the nodule had been culled not just from replacable skin or muscle, but from bone marrow and the fibers of her nervous system... things that could never be replaced. If her legs and arm were to form as flesh again, without a replacement for the matter that had the dead nodule, it was likely that they simply wouldn't work. Her legs and arm would die within days. Even worse, they might even be a threat to her life.  
  
Of course, the medtechs had told her time and again that they weren't sure that this was the case. The deroboticization process was just as much a mystery as ever. It was possible, although unlikely, that the deroboticizer would just replace the Laurentis nodule's missing mass with other material scooped from more nonessential parts of her limbs. It was also possible that the deroboticization process followed a preset plan for replacing everything, and that the missing nodule wouldn't matter at all.  
  
Before today, she had known with certainty that if a deroboticizer was ever found, it would instantly work. Now it was, at best, a gamble. She had lost something very special to her.  
  
"Remember, you haven't lost the most important thing," Rotor said to her. "You haven't lost hope."  
  
She and he sat by the edge of the ring pond. Her feet were near the edge of the water, but she still didn't dangle them into the pool - the fear of rust had been her constant companion for years, now. She regarded it wistfully, wishing she could stretch out and kick the surface.  
  
It was a cool evening; her first back in Knothole since the disaster of the past few days. It was late enough in the springtime that a few loose mosquitoes hovered in clouds above them. Bunnie's ears occasionally twitched to swat them away. Furless Rotor was having the roughest time, but if appearances were any judge, he didn't seem to mind too much.  
  
"Oh, Ah appreciate the thought, honey, but hope won't fix me... it won't make things go back to the way they used to, either."  
  
There was a pause of several moments before he answered, but the wait didn't seem out of place. It was so quiet and peaceful here. It was gentle sensation of laziness, cast against the backdrop of war though it was. She knew to cherish it. Seconds seemed to drift away meaninglessly here; whereas just yesterday, seconds had been all that had been between her and death.  
  
Finally, he said, "You know no one hates you for what happened. Lower Mobius wasn't your fault. Two years ago, if we'd all been given the same choice... I'm not sure anybody would have handled it differently."  
  
Bunnie looked down at the water, gamely scratching her organic arm. "Well, they may not hate me... but they shure do blame me."  
  
"No one blames you, either-"  
  
"Oh, bull pucky, Rote," Bunnie interrupted. "When they welcomed me back, ya saw their expressions as clearly as Ah did. Even Sally-girl was more distant ta me, though she tried ta hide it. Her eyes were... they were cold." She paused. "She had the same expression Ah saw on you, when Ah first told you about the Laurentis nodule."  
  
"All right," he said, "so they do blame you. You said yourself that they have a right to. You made a decision two years ago not to tell anyone about the transmitter. It happened to be the wrong one. Now you have to cope with the result."  
  
She looked up, and met Rotor's gaze. His eyes were crystal clear. For a moment, she was afraid that they were going to harden against her, but instead they remained as warm and soft as they had been a moment ago. His voice was less forgiving, but he still cared. He went on.  
  
"You were a teenager then, but you were still a Freedom Fighter. Everybody trusted you to look after their safety before your own... and, once, only once, you broke that implicit confidence. They may not hate you, but you did lose a lot of trust. You're going to have to start over; go back to two years ago. You're going to have to earn that trust again. This may be over, but... I'm sorry, Bunnie, but you're going to have to deal with the consequences."  
  
"That's all right, Rotor. If there's one thing Ah've learned recently... it's that everything has consequences."  
  
It was a consequence of the slip-up she'd made two years ago - not double- checking the back alley for surveillance devices - that had resulted in her roboticization, and everything that had led up to the disaster of the past few days.  
  
The consequences of not telling anyone that she suspected her leg held a transmitter hurt more right now, though. It had cost Drizit his life. It had cost Lower Mobius. It might not have cost her friendships, but it had come damn close. It would take time to heal the wounds.  
  
Griff had his own problems to deal with, and he'd earned them just as much as she had. The consequences of his earlier life, as Laurentis, had given Robotnik valuable information on how to use and abuse Sir Charles' roboticizer. He'd lost his city. He'd lost the confidence of his people. He hadn't lost enough for them to lose their faith in his leadership, and they hadn't planned to disavow him, but he'd stepped down anyway, just a few days after Bunnie had been released from their medical care. He'd been insistent about it, even over the protestations of his closest supporters. Dirk now led the Lower Mobius refugees in his absence.  
  
It had been a consequence of Bunnie's actions in saving Doctor Thaddeus's life that had led to her leg being patched up under his supervision. He was the only one who would've been able to figure out how to use the Lower Mobius power crystal as a replacement for the destroyed Laurentis nodule. It was a consequence of her friends' unwavering faith in her that they'd arrived in Robotropolis in time to save her life.  
  
Not all of the consequences were necessarily bad ones.  
  
She felt Rotor's smooth palm slip around her organic hand. She curled her fingers around his, and gave him a gentle squeeze.  
  
It had been a consequence of their trials under pressure that Bunnie and Rotor had been able to voice feelings that they hadn't even realized they'd possessed.  
  
"It'll take awhile," she told him, brightening, "but Ah think Ah can do it. Ah'll prove mahself all over again if Ah have to... Ah hope Ah won't have to, but Ah will if Ah do. Things won't evah be the same again, but Ah know Ah can win their trust back."  
  
"I'm glad," he said, smiling back. "So how long do you think it'll be before we get the old, optimistic Bunnie back?"  
  
"Optimistic?" Bunnie felt like chortling. "Seems like it's been forever since Ah felt like that."  
  
"Well, you were as bright and cheery as ever just a few days ago," Rotor said.  
  
"Yeah, b-before..."  
  
The smile dropped off of her face. She stared out at the placid surface of the power ring pool, and for the first time she was struck by just how much she'd changed since then. The world seemed so much darker now, and so much brighter back then. So much more ignorant back then, too. No, that wasn't true. She'd known about the Laurentis nodule and what it had hidden even then... for two whole years, she'd just deceived herself of the reality of it.  
  
"All that time Ah felt cheerful and warmhearted before... Ah wonder if the only thing Ah was ever doing was fooling mahself."  
  
"I don't think you were," Rotor said. "I think that those things are really a part of you, and that's only a matter of time until they're back."  
  
After being drenched in so much misery and self-pity ever since Drizit had came, she didn't think she ever could feel as happy here as she'd used to before. She didn't know how she could feel genuinely warmhearted again. Maybe Rotor was right, though. Laurentis nodule or no, those things had always been a part of her character. Maybe it was only a matter of time.  
  
He said, "In fact, I'm certain they will be."  
  
Bunnie looked at him. "What makes ya so sure?"  
  
"You've been so downcast over these past couple days. You've felt so miserable and dejected and unhappy with yourself. You've called yourself worse names than I've ever heard you describe anyone else as. You've convinced yourself that you're the worst person's who's ever been born... all because you made one bad decision two years ago. I know that you're not as awful as you think you are. You're one hell of a good person, and nothing you can say about yourself will change that."  
  
"Rotor, please don't try to..."  
  
"You've told me that throughout this entire event, you've felt as though you didn't have a choice about anything you did." Events flashed past her mind's eye. He was right. Leaving Knothole, saving Thaddeus, traveling to Robotropolis, ejecting Griff and Rotor from the hover car, stabbing herself - she hadn't felt like she'd had any real choice to make in any of these events, and she'd told him so. "You said you felt like the world had forced you to do what you did.  
  
"You're wrong, Bunnie. You did have a choice all along. Any other person would have handled it differently; definitely not as well as you have. You didn't have to leave Knothole. You didn't have to save me, Griff, or Thaddeus. You did make those decisions. You just didn't feel you had any choice because the answers were already built into you. You felt you had to do what you did because... well, you're Bunnie Rabbot. You're a hero."  
  
After all the serious and earnestness of the past few days, Bunnie only had a single response for that.  
  
"Rote," she grinned, "if Ah'm all it takes to qualify for a hero, then the rest of the world's in pretty poor shape!"  
  
He raised her palm to his face, and kissed the fur on the back of her hand.  
  
The mosquitoes no longer seemed like such a bother. Even as they lay back against the grass, the power ring pool was as sedate as ever. There wasn't another power ring due for at least another two hours, but Bunnie and Rotor were content to just laze there and wait.  
  
END 


End file.
